That’s something we think about a lot. After all, answering this question well leads to acquiring new business, while responding poorly sends potential customers fleeing for whichever competitor they’re comparing us to.

Comparing Retently to the competition is quite a challenge. Retently is a Customer Experience Management Platform – covering NPS, CSAT, CES surveys and customer feedback – and, as such, there are just too many things to consider. So, instead of filling out those classic “us VS them” comparison tables, we decided to go for something different and showcase some of Retently’s unique features and functionalities.

If you’re wondering why we’ve listed only 16 points, it’s not because we have just 16 unique features. This article covers features that only Retently has at the time of writing. We also wanted to keep this post fairly short, so we only focused on major things rather than exploring every minor detail.

This article covers a list of unique features offered by Retently, compared to other established competitors in the SMB and mid-market, such as InMoment Wootric, Delighted, AskNicely, and SatisMeter. There are more services, new products, and companies launching every month we might not be aware of.

SIDENOTE.

There’s a good chance that competing services will try to catch up, so all statements in this article are unlikely to hold true forever. But we’ll make sure to update it accordingly should anything change.

1. Everything is Linked to Survey Campaigns

Retently’s campaign is a unique feature. With most competitor tools, you can only set up the surveys and send them out either once or on a recurring basis. 

Retently, on the other hand, allows you to set up one-time, recurring regular and transactional campaigns, where a predefined set of surveys is sent to a specific customer segment.

This lets you run independent survey campaigns per product, service, or customer segment (group customers by various criteria – revenue, geography, lifecycle, etc.) and get an NPS, CSAT, or CES score. 

Each campaign comes with its own options for:

Survey Template

All you have to do is create, clone, or adjust an existing template for each campaign and use it when needed.

Audience

Each campaign comes with a preset filter that targets all customers in your Retently account, but you can apply additional filters to narrow your audience.

Schedule

Your surveys will be sent automatically according to the schedule. Choose whether you want your customers to receive the survey on business days only or any weekday. Set a timeframe limit for your surveys.

Next, set a schedule for new customers to be automatically surveyed, as well as the regularity of recurring surveys. You can also disable the recurring surveys option.

Another handy feature is the daily survey limit, which allows you to split your customer list and send a limited number of surveys daily, giving you enough time to engage with your respondents.

Optionally, you can have your CX survey resent to people who did not open the last survey or opened but did not respond. You can choose the same survey template or select a different one.

Alerts

When creating a new alert, you will be asked to choose one or more event types you want to be notified about, the notification frequency (immediately, daily, or weekly digest), and the channel (email or Slack).

Autoreplies

You can create a set of email auto-replies meant to engage with customers who did not leave any text feedback, left a Detractor score, or simply ask your Promoters for a review on Trustpilot and spread word-of-mouth.

Read more about Campaigns in our dedicated knowledge base section.

2. Advanced Survey Template Editor

Retently allows you to customize pretty much everything in your survey template:

• Change the background color
• Upload and adjust your logo, its size, and position
• Edit all texts’ font family, size, styling, and colors
• Adjust the shape, style, and color of all buttons
• Add additional text blocks and custom links

This applies to the Rating question, Open-ended question, Thank You page and the Unsubscribe page.

We’ve already provided default texts for the template, but every piece of the survey can be adapted to your unique case.

What’s more impressive is that the Open-ended question and Thank you page can be different for Promoters, Passives, and Detractors, allowing for a personalized approach and a better segmentation of the provided feedback.

The Thank You page follows the same editing logic. The difference here is that you can also add a CTA (call to action) link.

Get more ideas and NPS survey templates in this article.

3. Survey Personalization Using Merge Fields (Variables)

In their attempt to draft a successful survey campaign, businesses often overlook the survey subject line, and the context personalization can provide. In this respect, Retently allows using merge fields in the survey’s subject line and the content itself for a significantly increased open and response rate. 

Survey variables stand for particular customer attributes, such as the defaults “first name” or “company name”, as well as complex data, such as account manager or region, which can be added when importing customers from a CSV file or synchronizing them by means of our integrations or API.

Variables can be included pretty much in any text input area of the survey template – the subject line, the additional text blocks, the rating, and open-ended questions, as well as the Thank You screen. Before delivery, our system will replace the variables in the survey template with real data, which may differ for each customer or audience segment. 

But what if the customer doesn’t have any data in the property used as a variable? As a rule, the variable will be replaced with empty data; and here’s where fallbacks will turn helpful – a default value displayed if a customer doesn’t have a specific property. 

4. Multi-Language Surveys

Retently’s unique survey template editor also allows a perfect multi-language setup.

Most survey services come with a preset of translations, which are not adapted for each industry, or sometimes can be far from written by natives.

Retently doesn’t have a multi-language selector. Instead, you can fully customize your NPS survey texts and translate them into any language you need.

Read more about multi-language surveys in our knowledge base.

5. Keep Track and A/B Test Surveys With Outbox

To easily keep track of all the surveys sent to your customers, Retently came up with an Outbox section which, by means of a set of useful filters, allows for advanced data segmentation, meant to improve the survey campaigns along the way.

That brings in several benefits targeting increased survey engagement, namely:

The delivery stats section provides granular details about the survey response rate, when it was sent, opened, or responded down to the minute, and how many customers bounced or opted out of your surveys. These will allow for more data-driven decision-making.

The Outbox is also an effective tool to A/B test your survey samples over time. By looking into the delivery stats, you can track which templates were most appealing and apply the insights in future campaigns.

If used properly, the Outbox can also help improve the response rate. For example, you can manually select some or all filtered surveys and resend a one-time email survey in the campaign they’ve been sent initially.

6. Survey Queue Management

To streamline survey management, Retently introduced a Queue page that lists all email surveys triggered by specific events but not sent due to a pre-set delay. 

The purpose of the Queue page is rather simple – to provide a straightforward way to view, navigate, and filter upcoming surveys. It also allows users to send surveys ahead of the expected time or cancel them instead without going through individual campaigns’ settings.

7. Feedback Management

Since collecting customer feedback is the main surveying goal, the feedback management capabilities could not be overlooked. Retently came up with advanced collaboration, visualization, segmentation, and analysis of the received customer feedback. 

In this context, consider managing your feedback in your Slack instance. Our Slack integration allows receiving, tracking, and responding to customer feedback in real-time, right within Slack. Teams can easily prioritize tasks and take action to resolve the most pressing issues. For example, you can mark specific feedback and assign it to any of your team members within Retently for follow-up. This way, you can respond to customer needs more efficiently, improve collaboration between teams, and deliver better customer experiences.

8. Automated Email Cleanup

Retently has a built-in email cleaning feature. Before any surveys are delivered, your recipients’ emails will be automatically checked for deliverability to ensure a greater campaign response rate. Also, you’ll be substantially reducing your bounce rate and making sure you’ll receive more relevant, actionable feedback.

9. Antivirus Detection

To avoid random scores posted by antivirus systems in their search for harmful content, Retently implemented an algorithm to ensure data accuracy.

Our antivirus detection automatically blocks the scores submitted by well-known systems such as Symantec, Microsoft Outlook Protection, Mimecast, MessageLabs, Barracuda Email Security Service, etc. 

However, as they might also evolve and other similar systems be launched in the future, there is another check in place that monitors and logs antivirus-like patterns.

Once a score potentially left by a generic antivirus is detected, it is displayed in the feedback widget with a warning (!) sign. At this point, it is up to you to delete or just ignore it from your rating calculation. 

10. Data Segmentation and Export in All Plans

With Retently, you can easily segment your audience with any of our plans. Competitors require you to purchase their premium plans to enjoy this feature.

Exporting data (like users, feedback, and scores) is also available in all Retently plans – so everyone can access and export their data at no additional cost.

11. Industry Benchmarks

Retently has a built-in benchmark feature that allows you to compare your NPS score and trends with the average score for your industry. This way, you get to save time and effort since you have all needed data right on the dashboard. You no longer need to do lengthy Google searches and deal with paywalls to find what you need.

The benchmarks are calculated by doing an anonymous average, and we only cover industries where we have over ten clients to ensure the data is relevant and actionable. Currently, Retently offers incorporated NPS benchmarks for the following industries: SaaS, Ecommerce, Financial Services, Enterprise Software, Digital Marketing, Consulting, Insurance, Healthcare, Logistics & Transportation, Construction, etc.

12. No Data Retention Limits

Unless you cancel your Retently subscription, your data is always here – to access historical customer feedback, NPS scores and compare trends and progress.

Keep a longer history of your customer interactions, and don’t worry about data becoming unavailable after a while, or the need to upgrade to a higher plan.

13. Automation Playbooks

Retently allows you to easily automate various processes and run custom scenarios using the incorporated Zapier integration and webhooks.

Retently helps you create automation scenarios based on the “if this, then that” principle.

A few common and highly useful scenarios are:

• Automatically start a conversation with a Detractor
• Automatically send a message to people who did not leave text feedback
• Delete hard-bounced contacts from your list
• Export account NPS data to Salesforce or any other CRM
• Run a webhook and send your NPS score and feedback to a 3rd party service or application

Zapier, Make & Alloy Automation:

Zapier is an integration service that connects different applications (over 7,000 apps at the time of this writing). Connect Retently to your Zapier account and sync new contacts, send transactional NPS surveys, export customer feedback, and manage your team’s tasks.

The Zapier integration is not unique to Retently. Most established competitors feature one or maybe two possible Zapier triggers or actions. However, the number of potential automation scenarios using Zapier with Retently is overwhelming due to many supported triggers and actions.

Make & Alloy are also sought-for integrations that allow you to bring together various systems and platforms to create a seamless customer experience. The integrations enable companies to streamline their customer engagement and support processes, automate workflows for quick execution of repetitive tasks, and connect with customers across channels. Hence, you can efficiently adjust customer interactions and journeys, tailoring them to specific business goals, and thus provide faster and more consistent service delivery. 

Check our Zapier integration page here.

14. Account CX

Retently goes beyond tracking customer experience metrics on a contact level. With Retently, you have the flexibility to monitor CX metrics at an account (company) level. When you send out surveys, our system automatically generates a list of accounts, allowing you to see the number of contacts associated with each account in Retently. Additionally, you have the option to manually add new companies and view CX metrics for each. 

The best part is that this valuable information can be seamlessly exported through our native integrations or API to other services for in-depth analysis.

15. Automated Feedback Classification & Analytics

Retently offers unique analytics features, providing you with an insightful overview of the text feedback you’ve received. Our AI-powered algorithm automatically detects and classifies topics and performs sentiment analysis.

With this automated topic detection and sentiment analysis, you can quickly grasp which areas of your offerings resonate positively with your audience and which aspects require improvement before it’s too late. It simplifies the process of making data-driven decisions and offers a comprehensive understanding of your customer feedback.

16. Product UI/UX

Retently features visually pleasing UI that ensures running NPS surveys and campaigns doesn’t feel like a chore. Most of our customers have told us, on multiple occasions, how much they love the clean design and the streamlined user experience.

Retently features a slick, easy-to-use, and highly intuitive interface. All the data and information are in one place, thus being easily accessible. Data visualization is simple to follow and understand. The menus and tooltips are self-explanatory, allowing for no time wasted. Pretty much no onboarding is needed (not even for new, unfamiliar users).

That’s obviously not everything …

Retently has many more unique features and capabilities.

Most of our customers love our product design, its cleanliness, and the user experience.

Our customer support team efforts are highly appreciated, this being the second reason respondents score a 9 or 10 in our own NPS surveys.  

If you ever need any help or have a question for us, we’re right there for you – our support team works round-the-clock to offer you the best customer experience.

Don’t miss out on the many benefits of using Retently and experiencing a new level of customer engagement. Get started today with a 7-day free trial and take your CX to the next level.

The post 16 Unique Retently Features – Things That Only This CX Service Can Do appeared first on Retently CX.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways 
  • 1. Automate the Feedback Loop
  • 2. Approach Customers Before They Churn
  • 3. Channel Positive Feedback
  • 4. Streamline Task Management
  • 5. Analyze Text Feedback and Customer Sentiment
  • 6. Share Feedback Between Teams
  • 7. Import Feedback into Product Management Software
  • 8. Import Insights and Analyze Data in Business Analytics Platforms
• Bottom Line

Almost any business process improvement can be stripped down to a simple formula: achieve more with less time and effort. Whether it’s crunching data or integrating a bunch of analytics tools to understand and boost customer engagement, when you boil it down, people are just trying to do a better job and win some extra hours back into their days.

Following that logic, automation is the pillar of technology. Your processes can run day-and-night flawlessly to do the job while you focus your energy on more important things.

However, this is not just about winning time back in your day – at least when it comes to customer experience. The tech maturity of customer success teams that automate their key processes strongly correlates to significant business growth.

Whether your team uses Retently or you’re just curious to learn more about customer feedback workflow automation, take a look at these practical ideas:

Key Takeaways 

• Capture customer insights effortlessly through trigger-based surveys to ensure timely responses without manual effort.
• Automatically sort responses by sentiment (positive, neutral, negative) and tag them by themes (product, support, pricing), so teams can focus on what matters most.
• Set up automated follow-ups, escalation workflows, and personalized responses to acknowledge feedback and resolve issues quickly.
• Trigger recovery workflows for Detractors, reward loyal customers and schedule targeted follow-ups to turn feedback into long-term business growth.
• Track trends effortlessly with real-time dashboards and reports that highlight key insights, ensuring teams stay informed without manual data pulling.

Ready to take the hassle out of feedback management? Let’s dive into how automation can transform the way you listen to and engage with your customers!

1. Automate the Feedback Loop

We’ve already written an in-depth article about the customer feedback loop and the main idea is this: it’s a customer insight-driven process that helps you continuously improve your products and services. Yet, closing the customer feedback loop is even more important because it shows customers you genuinely understand their pain points, act on their suggestions, and want their business to succeed. 

Unfortunately, doing it manually can be very daunting and time-consuming. You need to reach out – and this must be personalized for each customer segment (Promoters, Passives, and Detractors).

Luckily, automation can help you with that. For example, if your Customer Experience Management platform has automation abilities, you can create predefined replies that will be automatically sent out when a certain event is triggered. You can draft a customized response containing a relevant discount or referral link for your Promoters. Or, you could send automated conversation starters to customers who leave no text feedback.

You can do the same thing with Zapier. Basically, you could configure integrations with services like Customer.io, Drift, and Intercom to send your clients automated personalized messages whenever you receive new feedback.

With the replies being taken care of, your customer success team can spend more time and energy on more pressing matters, like addressing customer concerns or working on personalized rewards and upgrades.

2. Approach Customers Before They Churn

Customer churn should never be taken lightly. In the US alone, businesses lose $136.8 billion each year because customers switch brands. So, managing churn is paramount. An efficient way to do that is to look into customer feedback in order to spot the main problems your customers deal with. You should also keep an eye on inactive accounts and those that are past due.

Not all customer issues are the same – some can be unique in their own way. Hence, using general, automated replies to close the feedback loop can be quite tricky. However, workflow scenarios would give you a hand allowing you to automatically start conversations with upset customers whenever they leave negative feedback and take immediate action to address their issues. 

Even lost customers are an opportunity to learn something if the survey platform you’re using offers proper workflow automation. All you need to do is schedule exit surveys that are automatically triggered when a customer cancels their subscription or does not upgrade from a free trial. Such surveys can help you find out why your clients churn and what you can do to solve the problems that contribute to that. 

Surveying departing customers can also unlock valuable insights about your product or business as a whole that, if taken into account, can drive impressive improvements and, as a result, encourage growth. NPS surveys are short and simple, allowing customers to speak their minds without significant time commitment, and time is something a leaving client would not want to waste. Moreover, the open-ended question invites honest customer feedback instead of bombarding them with multiple questions framing their answers.

3. Channel Positive Feedback

Positive reviews can do wonders for B2B sellers since around 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase after reading a positive, trusted review. The same goes for B2Cs with product reviews being among the top three sources of information in the US. Also, if your business has great reviews, people might be willing to spend 31% more on it.

The good news is that a powerful Customer Experience Management platform can make it very simple to gather positive feedback. You’ll know who your Promoters are and what they love about your brand. All that’s left is convincing them to turn that feedback into positive reviews everyone can see. The best way to do that is to request the review on the survey Thank you page or in an automated reply to your Promoters.

Basically, you should have personalized messages that are triggered whenever a client leaves positive feedback. The message should be friendly and encourage the customer in question to leave reviews on relevant websites (Capterra, G2 Crowd, Google, Yelp, etc.). Ideally, you should include special discounts and other offers to motivate your Promoters. Also, make sure to leave in your message direct links to the websites where you want the reviews to show up – it makes things easier for your customers.

If you find out that some of your Promoters are social media influencers, make sure to ask them to write a post or make a video about your product too. Of course, you should offer them something in exchange.

Integrations with WordPress can also help you export positive reviews, while integration with Trustpilot would make it easy for you to send automatic review invitations.

Don’t forget – customers prefer doing business with the ones they trust, so miss no opportunity for your Promoters to make you visible.

4. Streamline Task Management

Team collaboration platforms help boost productivity and are a great way to ensure that every department knows what tasks they’re supposed to handle. However, creating the tasks, organizing them, and assigning the right people still takes time and effort – especially when it comes to customer feedback.

Fortunately, with proper automation in place, your team won’t need to spend hours planning, setting up tasks and following up on them. If you integrate your Customer Experience Management platform with your task management tool, like Trello or Asana, you can save tons of time thanks to workflows. For example, you can have the platform automatically create a task, subtasks and assign the relevant team members to them. 

Such a workflow can be extremely valuable. Let’s say you’ve got a dedicated team member responsible for reaching out to Detractors who don’t leave feedback, or Passives who give a low rating (7 instead of 8). If you use automation, relevant tasks can be automatically created and updated, saving the said team member time and effort, allowing them to focus more on engaging with customers.

There are cases when an immediate solution to the encountered issue is not possible, but you took note and have included it in your product roadmap. To make your customer opinion count, you can set a reminder in your task management software for you to come back to this pain point after a specific period of time (the estimated implementation period) and update the customer accordingly.  

5. Analyze Text Feedback and Customer Sentiment

Customer feedback can be extremely useful, but it can get problematic if you receive it at a large scale, as it is very time-consuming and challenging to turn large amounts of text feedback into actionable data. 

After all, you can’t really have a dedicated team manually sift through all the feedback to find the main likes and dislikes (you could, but it’d be a huge time and money sink). Moreover, you can’t afford to reduce meaningful feedback to basic ideas that don’t tell you anything about what your customers want.

That’s where AI-powered categorization and tagging come in. Using AI and automation, you can instantly organize feedback, prioritize issues, and ensure the right teams take action.

Specialized services like MonkeyLearn or Thematic turn handy. Basically, it’s an automated text analysis solution that can quickly obtain valuable insights from tons of customer feedback. These platforms can help you group responses into general theme-buckets for you to easily spot common customer pain points. Also, it can highlight customer sentiment towards your offering, helping you track customers at risk of churn. 

At present, sentiment analysis is a topic of great interest, being an efficient way to interpret and convert attitudes into actionable insights. The variety of sentiment analysis systems differ by their focus, the main ones looking into:

• Polarity (positive, negative, neutral),
• Emotions (happy, sad, angry, frustrated), or
• Intentions (interested or not).

AI-driven sentiment analysis can automatically detect the emotional tone of each response and sort it into categories to help businesses:

• Identify happy customers who might be open to referrals, reviews, or upsells.
• Spot neutral customers who are indifferent or undecided – great candidates for follow-ups.
• Flag unhappy customers who need quick intervention before they churn.

By automating this process, you get an instant overview of how customers feel without spending hours analyzing raw feedback.

If your CX platform allows it, you can integrate it with MonkeyLearn (or similar tools) directly or through Zapier. You can configure a customer feedback workflow automation where responses are analyzed, customer sentiment is extracted, and all the data is tagged in a dashboard. For example, you could set up tags like “Onboarding,” “Product Features,” and “Customer Support” to see which business areas need more attention.

With AI-driven categorization and tagging, feedback goes from a chaotic mess to clear, structured insights – ready to be acted on. No more digging through endless survey responses. No more missed opportunities to fix issues before they escalate.

6. Share Feedback Between Teams

Microsoft Teams, Slack and their open-source alternative Mattermost are online messaging platforms that work well for customer success since they can be integrated with help desk solutions, live chat platforms, and phone support tools. You can even create dedicated channels for customers to talk to your team.

But did you know you can also integrate these platforms with your CX platform? Whether you do it directly or through Zapier, you’ll be able to keep your team constantly up-to-date with your customer ratings and feedback. You can set up triggers that automatically notify you through Slack, for example, when:

• A new customer rating is given;
• A customer chooses to unsubscribe from your surveys;
• Your customer satisfaction score goes up or down;
• Someone opened your survey but didn’t give any rating after a specific period of time.

You can choose to send automatic messages to a specific channel when any of the above happens, so that your team is immediately notified about any changes and is always on track with all your customer data and behavior. Also, you can set automatic reminders and channel topics. Apart from immediate notifications, you can opt for daily and weekly digests about your customer ratings and feedback.

7. Import Feedback into Product Management Software

Platforms similar to ProductBoard are very helpful, doing wonders in your product development process. These product management tools make it easy for you and your product team to see what fixes or features customers want to see. 

Besides that, it saves time by letting you quickly prioritize tasks and share your roadmap across all departments. Also, such product management software can help you get valuable user feedback by letting customers vote on proposed ideas or submit their own suggestions.

One efficient way you can use automation to save even more time with ProductBoard, for example, is to integrate your NPS platform with an online communication platform like Slack to import feedback. Then, you can set up an action in Slack to automatically import all the feedback data you need into ProductBoard. 

Alternatively, if the NPS platform allows it, you can integrate it directly with ProductBoard or use Zapier to do it. Thus, you can set notes to be automatically created in ProductBoard whenever a new customer rating or response is received or whenever a respondent is opting out.

By doing any of the above, you’ll make sure your product team no longer has to dig through customer feedback, allowing them to focus on addressing said feedback by adding new features, testing them, and fixing issues instead.

8. Import Insights and Analyze Data in Business Analytics Platforms

Metrics are merely a bunch of scarce data if not neatly organized and kept track of on a daily basis. But how do we get to make sense of them if there are so many data sources to look into?

Using a data warehouse would bring major benefits in this respect and, mainly, ensure easy access to valuable info by storing it in one place, thus allowing for more accurate business decisions. 

Since you can integrate your Customer Experience Management software with many data warehousing platforms (Airtable, Firebase, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.), you can make it easier for your executive team to find ways to improve the customer experience.

What kind of insights can you sync with your data warehouse? Well, data like:

• Customers who opened surveys but didn’t score them;
• Specific Detractor scores (0, 1, or 2);
• Passives and Detractors who don’t leave any text feedback;
• Customers who manually unsubscribed from your surveys;
• Feedback you received after releasing new features.

You can sync even more data after running a recurring survey campaign, like whether the score went up or down or if a customer changed their initial rating. Best of all – records can be automatically created and updated according to the existing feedback data that is synced, saving you tons of time and effort. 

Companies have access to plenty of performance data; however, it is still inaccessible to most of the team since it’s stored in so many places and thus seen in pieces.

In case you use Databox or its alternatives, you’ll have a very easy time keeping track of all the necessary KPIs and sharing results across the team as they happen. It’s a business analytics dashboard that pulls all your data into one place, helping your team shift their focus from calculating spreadsheets and drafting reports to quickly spotting and acting on valuable insights. With real-time access to performance, it is very simple to visualize where you are on your goals, identify trends and make the necessary adjustments on the fly, as well as make data-driven decisions in the long run.

If you integrate the software with your CX service, you can easily push custom data to Databox every time you receive a customer rating, new feedback or whenever a customer opts out. Also, you can trigger an automatic increase for a specific metric’s counter whenever new feedback is received. By leveraging such data boards, the team will be in control of the company’s performance, being able to use the available information to further prioritize tasks as required.

Bottom Line

Automation is the key to business success. It saves time and money, offers better insights and reduces the risk of human error. Also, automation has allowed our customers to sync millions of data points between their success, support, sales, and marketing systems. 

If you’re looking for a versatile Customer Experience Management platform that supports multiple integration and automation scenarios, give Retently a try. Retently includes a variety of integrations that allow customers to build automated workflows and help customer success teams evolve from being reactive to predictive. 

Oh, and if you’ve got any other customer feedback automation playbooks in mind that we haven’t discussed here, feel free to let us know in the comments below.

The post 8 Practical Customer Feedback Workflow Automation Ideas appeared first on Retently CX.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• The Philosophy Behind CES
• What Is Customer Effort Score?
• When Is the Right Time to Send a CES Survey?
• How to Put Together a Good Customer Effort Score Question
• How to Interpret Customer Effort Score Results
• Customer Effort Score – The Good and the Bad
• Actionable Insights: What CES Scores Are Really Telling You
• Is Only Using Customer Effort Score Surveys Enough?
• Bottom line

Disloyal customers are costing businesses billions. But what actually triggers disloyalty? Former CEB Global’s research (now part of Gartner) explained that the level of effort consumers put into interacting with a brand directly impacts loyalty levels. In fact, according to CEB Global, around 96% of consumers who reported having difficulty solving a problem were more disloyal.

How do you know how easy it is for your clients to interact with your business, though? Well, that’s where the Customer Effort Score comes into play.

Curious about how CES can transform your customer experience strategy? Let’s dive in!

Key Takeaways

• Customer Effort Score measures how easy it is for customers to complete a task or resolve an issue, and low effort is proven to drive higher loyalty and reduce churn.
• CES helps businesses identify friction points in real-time, allowing them to address issues before they escalate and improve the overall customer experience.
• It can be customized to specific touchpoints, such as onboarding, checkout, or post-support interactions, making it a versatile tool for mapping customer effort across the journey.
• CES scores are only valuable if paired with actionable steps, whether through process improvements, better communication, or self-service tools.

The Philosophy Behind CES

Let’s get real for a moment: it doesn’t matter how amazing your product is if using it feels like a marathon with hurdles. The harsh truth is that customers will walk away – even from a brilliant product or service – if the experience is too complicated, frustrating, or time-consuming.

This is where the “ease breeds loyalty” principle is front and center. We’re wired to favor experiences that are smooth and effortless. Think about the last time you breezed through a self-checkout or got fast support. Chances are, you walked away feeling good about the interaction and the brand behind it.

Now flip that around. Ever had to call customer support five times to resolve a simple issue? Or wade through a confusing returns process? Even if the end result was fine, the effort you spent probably left a sour taste. This is the paradox of high-effort experiences: even the best products or outcomes can fail if getting there feels like too much work. Here’s where CES takes the floor.

What Is Customer Effort Score?

A general Customer Effort Score definition describes it as a type of customer survey that measures how easy it was for a client to interact with your business (solving an issue with customer support, making a purchase, signing up for a trial, etc.).

Consumers are generally asked how they agree with a statement (“The company made it easy for me to solve my problem”, for instance), to rate their level of effort, or just to answer a question (“How easy was it for you to solve your problem today?”, for example).

CES Survey Types

There are a few metrics you can use to measure your Customer Effort Score, but keep in mind that they can change the way you calculate and score surveys:

• The Likert scale –  This method involves a “Strongly Disagree/Strongly Agree” scale structured as such: Strongly Disagree – Disagree – Somewhat Disagree – Undecided – Somewhat Agree – Agree – Strongly Agree. The answers are usually numbered 1 to 7, and you can also color code each one to make everything more visually intuitive for respondents (having “Strongly Agree” in green and “Strongly Disagree” in red, for instance).

• The 1-10 scale – This metric involves having respondents offer an answer to your question in the 1-10 range. Generally, the 7-10 segment is associated with positive responses (if you’re asking customers how easy it was to do something, for instance). However, if your question asks the respondent to rate the level of effort, the 1-3 segment will be associated with positive results instead (since they represent low effort).

• The 1-5 scale – In this case, the answer options are as follows: Very Difficult – Difficult – Neither – Easy – Very Easy, and they are numbered from 1 to 5. You can also reverse the order.

• Emotions Faces – While this metric is pretty simple, it’s useful if you run a lot of CES surveys for minor aspects of your product/service/website. Plus, it also makes it easy and intuitive for respondents to quickly answer. Basically, you use Happy Face, Neutral Face and Unhappy Face images as responses, with the Happy Face usually meaning there was little effort required.

When Is the Right Time to Send a CES Survey?

Generally, CES web surveys are sent to customers during these key moments:

After an Interaction That Led to a Purchase

Sending out Customer Effort Score surveys after a client interacts with your product/service or service team and ends up purchasing is a great way to collect real-time feedback about what improvements you need to make to streamline the buying experience.

For example, you should always send out a CES survey after a customer signs up for a free trial or finishes the onboarding period. That’s especially relevant since poor onboarding accounts for 23% of average customer churn. It helps you quickly determine if any adjustments are necessary to make others more likely to buy from you.

Where CES Fits In:

• Onboarding: Ask, “How easy was it to get started with [our product/service]?” to gauge how smoothly new users can complete the setup process.
• Sign-Up or Registration: Use CES to measure how seamless your sign-up process is. Questions like “How simple was it to create an account?” can help you identify if there’s unnecessary friction.
• Product Discovery: For ecommerce or in-store shopping, ask something like, “How easy was it to find/locate the product you were looking for?” to uncover whether customers are struggling to navigate your offerings.

They say first impressions last a lifetime, and this couldn’t be more true for customer experience. Whether it’s a first-time user navigating your app or a shopper exploring your website, the ease of these initial interactions can set the tone for your entire relationship.

Right After a Client’s Interaction with Customer Service

Sending out a CES survey after a customer service touchpoint (such as email support tickets) lets you quickly assess the efficiency of your support team and identify areas for improvement to boost overall performance. You should also consider sharing such a survey after a customer finishes reading a Knowledge base article, since it will help you find out how helpful your content is.

In this case, sending out CES questionnaires at a specific interval is unnecessary. Since the question asks respondents how much effort they had to put into solving a problem, it makes more sense to deploy the survey after customer service touchpoints.

Where CES Fits In:

• Support Follow-Up: After a live chat, email, or phone call, ask, “How smooth was your experience getting support via [phone/email]?” This gives you direct feedback on how your support team is performing.
• Self-Service Tools: For FAQs or knowledge bases, try, “How easy was it to find the answer you needed?” to measure the effectiveness of your resources.

Even the best brands can’t avoid occasional issues. What sets great businesses apart is how easy they make it to fix those problems. 

After Any Interaction Surfacing Usability Experience

The CES survey can be sent out after any interaction that, in one way or another, could cause friction and result in a negative customer experience. This can be related to the launch of a new feature to follow up on its adoption and inquire about potential pain points, to learn more about the efficiency of your internal processes or the overall usability experience. 

The question needs to revolve around that interaction and be triggered upon its completion to make recollections accurate and the received feedback actionable. With Retently you can now create survey questions tailored to specific events with just a click, so you are never short of ideas.

Where CES Fits In:

• Checkout and Payments – Ask, “How smooth was your checkout experience?” to uncover pain points like slow-loading pages, complicated forms, or unexpected fees –  areas where customers may abandon their cart due to unnecessary friction.
• New Feature Adoption – After launching a new product feature, ask, “How easy was it to start using [new feature]?” to measure the learning curve.
• Subscription or Plan Changes – For subscription-based businesses, ask, “How easy was it to upgrade or modify your plan?” to ensure the process isn’t discouraging users from making changes.

Introducing the Concept of “Effort Hotspots”

Effort hotspots are those specific stages in the customer journey where friction tends to pile up. These are moments where customers are more likely to feel overwhelmed, frustrated, or stuck – and they’re prime candidates for CES measurement.

How CES identifies hotspots? By mapping CES scores across the customer journey, you can identify recurring low scores at specific touchpoints. For example, if your checkout process consistently receives low CES scores, it’s a clear sign to review and simplify it.

Hotspots can also vary by audience. A tech-savvy customer might find onboarding easy, while a less-experienced user may struggle – CES helps you uncover these differences.

Fixing effort hotspots is one of the fastest ways to improve overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. When you focus on reducing friction at these critical moments, you’re creating a smoother, more enjoyable experience that keeps customers coming back.

How to Put Together a Good Customer Effort Score Question

For starters, make sure the wording is as unambiguous as possible. Don’t ask customers about anything that doesn’t have to do with customer effort. Also, the tone of your question should be neutral so that the respondent doesn’t feel like you’re trying to favor a particular answer.

Ideally, you should also avoid using the word “effort”  – ironic, we know. That’s because the word’s meanings can differ from language to language, so there’s a chance you might get irrelevant answers.

And make sure your CES survey question marks off an area of analysis – be it the overall experience a customer had with your website/brand, or just a singular customer interaction moment (like live chat).

Lastly, there are two ways to format the question:

1. Make it a statement – This format is handy when using the 1-7 Likert scale. Here’s a Customer Effort Score question example of that: “How much do you agree with the following statement: The company’s website makes buying items easy for me.” 
2. Make it a direct question – This format is more suited to surveys that use the 1-10 and Happy/Unhappy face metrics. Here’s an example: “How much effort did it take to solve your problem?”/”How difficult was it for you to solve your problem?”

We personally recommend using the statement format – both because the 1-7 Likert scale is more accurate to work with when calculating your CES score, and because the direct question format usually relies on using the word “effort,” which we already mentioned can be a bit problematic if you have an international client base. If that’s not a concern, though, the direct question format can work well too.

How to Interpret Customer Effort Score Results

One of the easiest ways to measure CES results is to get an average score (X out of 10). This is generally done with the 1-10 Customer Effort Score scale. Simply take the total sum of your CES scores and divide it by the number of responses you have received.

So, if 100 people responded to your Customer Effort Score survey, and the total sum of their scores amounts to 700, that means your CES score is 7 (out of 10).

If you’re using other metrics (like Happy/Unhappy faces or an Agree/Disagree scale), you could also try performing a Customer Effort Score calculation by subtracting the percentage of people who responded positively from the percentage of respondents who offered a negative response. The neutral responses are normally ignored.

For instance, let’s say you had 400 respondents; 250 of them responded positively and the rest negatively. By subtracting 37.5% negative answers (150/400 x 100) from the 62.5% positive answers, you get a CES score of 25%.

If you’re using the 1-7 Disagree/Agree scale, we also found it’s best to divide the total number of people who offered a 5-7 response (Somewhat Agree – Agree – Strongly Agree) by the total number of respondents. Afterward, multiply the result by 10 or 100 (depending on whether you use a 1-10 or 1-100 scale). You could do the same with the 1-5 scale (with 4 and 5 being the positive responses).

Here’s an example – if you had 100 respondents and 70 of them offered a positive response, your CES score will either be 7 or 70 (70/100 x 10/100).

What Is a Good Customer Effort Score?

The answer is a bit tricky – mostly because performing a Customer Effort Score benchmark against competitors is difficult since there is no clear industry-wide standard to compare against, and also because whether or not your CES score is a good one depends on your Customer Effort Score question and the metrics you use.

After all, if you use the Disagree/Agree scale for answers, where “Strongly Disagree” is numbered with 1 and “Strongly Agree” is numbered with 7, and have a statement like “The company made it easy for me to solve my problem,” you’ll clearly want to have a high CES score – ideally, one that’s over 5/50.

On the other hand, if your CES survey response scale associates 1/Happy Face metrics with “Less Effort” and 10/Unhappy Face metrics with “A Lot of Effort”, and directly asks customers how much effort they had to put into performing a certain action, you should strive to have a low CES score.

As in the case of other customer satisfaction scores, in order to get a grasp of where you stand, you should compare the CES with your score over a specific period of time, to see if your efforts are paying off. If you are experiencing an increase, it means you are on the right track; otherwise, you should dig deep into customer feedback to see what you are missing.

Customer Effort Score – The Good and the Bad

CES has both good and bad sides, but let’s see if the cons pale compared to the pros of using such a survey.

Advantages

One of the great things about CES surveys is that they are actionable and specific – they can quickly show which areas need improvement to streamline the customer experience.

Besides that, Customer Effort Score results have been found to be a strong predictor of future purchase behavior. In fact, according to this HBR’s research, approximately 94% of customers who reported they experienced “low effort” in interactions with a business said they would buy again from it. Also, 88% of those consumers said they would spend more money too.

The same research also shows us that CES can give you an idea of how likely your customers are to refer your brand to others, and how they would speak of it. Basically, around 81% of customers who reported they put in a lot of effort when interacting with a business said they intended to speak negatively of the brand in question. So, it’s possible to assume that consumers who are happy with the low level of effort asked of them will likely recommend the brand to others or, at the very least, speak positively of it.

Disadvantages

While CES drawbacks aren’t really a deal-breaker, they are worth highlighting. For one, the Customer Effort Score can’t really tell you what kind of relationship a consumer has with your brand in general. A low effort score can improve customer satisfaction levels, but it does not necessarily point to loyalty toward a brand. Also, CES can’t tell you how your customers and their ratings are influenced by factors such as your competitors, products, and pricing.

Another issue worth mentioning is the fact that CES surveys don’t offer a way to segment customers by type. While the Customer Effort Score surveys have good predicting purchase power, this is limited to only a specific group of customers who, for example, interact with the support team or go through your self-service options. Since CES are transactional in nature, they focus only on specific interactions and, therefore – a limited group of users.

As one-off surveys, CES offers data with short-term relevancy. Hence they must be triggered right after and wherever the said interaction or transaction takes place (be it email, in-app or chat), so that the feedback is tied to context.

And lastly, CES surveys can tell you a customer had difficulty solving a problem, but they don’t tell you why. For example, if a consumer says it was hard to try and get something your brand can’t actually offer, that’s not a relevant result for your business.

Actionable Insights: What CES Scores Are Really Telling You

Measuring CES is great, but the real value comes from understanding what’s behind the numbers. A low CES score doesn’t just mean customers had a hard time – it tells you exactly where the friction is happening and what you can do about it.

By breaking CES down into actionable themes, you can pinpoint the real problem areas and build a strategy to make customer interactions smoother, faster, and more enjoyable.

1. Process Friction: What’s Slowing Customers Down?

Sometimes, the issue isn’t what customers are trying to do – it’s how they have to do it. If customers consistently report high effort, it’s a sign that something in the process is slowing them down.

Signs of Process Friction:

• Customers take too many steps to complete a simple action (e.g., checkout, returns, sign-ups).
• There are unexpected roadblocks, like mandatory account creation before making a purchase.
• Forms or workflows are too long, confusing, or repetitive.

How to Fix It:
Streamline steps – reduce unnecessary clicks, auto-fill forms, and remove redundant steps.
Optimize for speed – improve website load times and make sure mobile experiences are just as smooth as desktop ones.
Test your own processes – walk through your customer journeys like a first-time user and find pain points firsthand.

2. Communication Gaps: Are Customers Getting the Right Information?

Customers don’t like feeling lost. If they can’t easily find answers or if instructions are unclear, they’ll feel like they have to work too hard to get what they need.

Signs of Communication Gaps:

• Customers ask the same support questions repeatedly, suggesting FAQs or help docs aren’t effective.
• There’s inconsistent messaging across channels (e.g., website says one thing, customer support says another).
• Instructions are too vague or technical, making it hard for non-experts to follow.

How to Fix It:
Clarify instructions – rewrite FAQs, tooltips, and support content in simple, direct language.
Align messaging across teams – make sure customer support, marketing, and product teams are all on the same page.
Proactively provide information – send clear post-purchase or onboarding emails to guide customers before they hit friction.

3. Empowerment Issues: Are Customers Too Dependent on Support?

If customers frequently reach out for help, it’s a red flag that they don’t feel empowered to solve issues on their own.

Signs of Empowerment Issues:

• High volume of repeat support tickets for the same problem.
• Customers can’t complete basic tasks without assistance (e.g., changing account settings, tracking orders).
• Your self-service options (like chatbots or help centers) aren’t being used or aren’t helpful.

How to Fix It:
Improve self-service resources – make sure help articles, chatbots, and FAQs are easy to find and actually useful.
Enhance UI/UX – sometimes the issue isn’t the process, but how it’s presented. A more intuitive design can eliminate confusion.
Educate customers proactively – consider short video tutorials, walkthroughs, or onboarding emails to help customers navigate your product without needing support.

The Effort Action Plan: Reducing Friction, One Step at a Time

Fixing high-effort experiences isn’t just about tweaking one thing – it’s about creating a system for continuous improvement. That’s where an Effort Action Plan is needed.

Here’s how to build one:

Identify Effort Hotspots: Look at CES scores by touchpoint (onboarding, checkout, support, etc.) to see where customers struggle most.
Categorize the Issues: Determine whether the problem is process friction, communication gaps, or an empowerment issue.
Prioritize Fixes: Start with high-impact areas (e.g., if checkout is a major pain point, focus there first).
Implement and Test Changes: Reduce unnecessary steps, clarify messaging, or improve self-service options – then track CES scores over time to measure improvement.
Make It a Habit: Keep measuring and refining to ensure effort stays low as your business grows.

If customers tell you something was hard, believe them – and take action. CES gives you the blueprint for removing friction, helping you turn frustrating moments into effortless experiences that keep customers happy and loyal.

Is Only Using Customer Effort Score Surveys Enough?

While CES app surveys are a great source of customer insight, it’s better when you pair them with a satisfaction-oriented survey – like Net Promoter Score, for example.

For the sake of this article, we’ll throw in a quick definition: NPS is a customer satisfaction survey that asks consumers how likely they are (on a scale from 0 to 10) to recommend your brand to other people. NPS surveys allow you to send follow-up questions to ask why the customer gave a particular rating, essentially letting you find out what exactly you need to improve to boost customer loyalty.

Using CES alongside NPS will let you accurately measure both consumer effort and loyalty. The two metrics effectively complement each other and allow you to focus on two vital aspects of your business instead of just one – especially since NPS lets you segment customers. Moreover, it seems that top-performing low-effort companies tend to have an NPS that is 65 points higher than top-performing high-effort businesses, further showing the link between Customer Effort Score and Net Promoter Score.

Bottom line

CES is one more transactional instrument in your toolbox that can help you pinpoint weaknesses across service interactions and a product’s ease of use. Since customer experience expectations are ever-evolving, consistently keeping an eye on effort scores, overall customer satisfaction and trends in the data is already a necessity. However, more data isn’t necessarily better data. The metrics have value only when the respective feedback is converted into follow-up actions and product improvements. 

Whether you are looking for a single customer satisfaction metric or a more complex approach, Retently got you covered. You can have all your data – NPS, CSAT, CES – under one roof with insightful analytics helping you sift through the conglomerate of feedback. Sign up for your free trial to see for yourself how easy it is to get started.

The post What is Customer Effort Score (CES) & How to Measure It? appeared first on Retently CX.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Does CX Mean?
• What Is Customer Satisfaction?
• Measuring Customer Satisfaction
• What Metrics Measure Customer Satisfaction?
• Which Customer Satisfaction Metric Is Better?
• Quick Wins: How to Decide Which CX Metric to Use
• Ready to Start Tracking Customer Satisfaction Metrics?

For every complaint you receive, there are approximately 26 customers who are unhappy with your company, but choose to say nothing. Those are the clients you will most likely lose if you don’t take proper action.

Besides just losing clients and revenue, low customer satisfaction levels can also harm your brand’s image – especially if certain customer complaints go viral online.

Luckily, customer satisfaction measurement tools can help you collect valuable customer feedback, so you can make the changes and improvements your customer base is actually asking for – all to offer them a better experience and a more pleasant customer journey.

For the sake of keeping things simple, we should mention that customer satisfaction metrics are generally also called CX metrics.

Key Takeaways

• No single metric can capture the full customer experience. Using NPS, CSAT, and CES together ensures a well-rounded understanding that addresses both strategic and operational needs.
• NPS helps with the long-term strategy, CSAT improves specific touchpoints and CES optimizes processes, making these metrics critical across the customer lifecycle.
• CX metrics are only valuable when paired with qualitative feedback and used to make meaningful improvements, such as resolving pain points, streamlining processes, or enhancing customer support.
• Companies that consistently track NPS, CSAT and CES outperform competitors in customer retention, loyalty and revenue growth.  

What Does CX Mean?

CX stands for Customer Experience. An accurate CX definition describes customer experience as the way consumers perceive how your brand interacts and treats them. That perception has the potential to influence the way people feel about your business, and how likely they are to do business with you and talk positively about your brand.

So, it’s easy to see why CX and customer satisfaction metrics are interchangeable. Usually, the provided customer satisfaction score is a good indicator of customer experience.

Just how important is CX, you ask? Well, consider this – according to research, it was bound to become the main brand differentiator by 2020, effectively overtaking pricing and product –  statement undoubtedly confirmed years past.

On top of that, great CX is directly linked to improved brand loyalty and increased retention rates. After all, data shows that consumers who enjoy a great customer experience are 5 times more likely to recommend a brand to others. Also, customers who have a positive CX are 54% more likely to make another purchase.

Now you may have some knowledge of why CX makes the best business decisions but you need reliable methods that can collect customer insights for efficient improvements. So how do you actually perceive and measure customer satisfaction, what are the data sources, and which are the best customer satisfaction metrics to rely on. Let’s get to it, shall we?

What Is Customer Satisfaction?

It seems that there is no universally accepted definition of customer satisfaction. However, most of them agree that customer satisfaction is closely connected to expectations, hence the ongoing debate as to whether it is a cognitive or an emotionally-driven process. 

There are many interesting theories used to explain customer satisfaction, but the two considered to best portray the concept are the disconfirmation and value-percept theories. 

The first indicates that customers compare a new experience with a standard they already have in mind, and their satisfaction with the product/service depends on whether it lives up to the respective expectations. It is a generally accepted theory, however it is difficult to apply it to all product categories.

According to the expectancy-value theory, customers make judgments about a product’s value and its benefits, based on personal needs and wants. Customer satisfaction levels depend on how close the initial judgment is to the value the product provides after the actual purchase.

To sum up, the difference between the performance of the product a customer interacts with and the personal expectations and needs in relation to it, is what shapes customer satisfaction. Still, a rather abstract notion I would say – so how can it be translated into something measurable?

Measuring Customer Satisfaction

According to researchers, the customer satisfaction measurement can be divided into two categories: the direct measurement system (data provided directly by the customer, for example via customer satisfaction surveys) and indirect measurement system (data surfaced from sales numbers/revenue streams, app engagement, etc.).

When it comes to measuring customer satisfaction, the standard approach is by means of a scale rating. The most familiar one is the scale from 0 to 10, mostly due to its similarity with the scoring used in education systems worldwide, but also can be scales of 1 to 7, 1 to 5, emoticons, thumbs-up and stars.

Given the different information streams and the various categories, there are several tools and metrics used to approach the customer and analyze the results – data that if acted upon leads to increased customer loyalty, retention and as a result revenue.

What Metrics Measure Customer Satisfaction?

NPS, CSAT, and CES are the most commonly used customer satisfaction metrics. This is mostly due to the fact that they are rather straightforward, simple in their implementation and very easy to be understood by all staff categories as compared to complex indexes. We’ll quickly showcase what each metric is and how it works, to then help consider which one is a better option.

Respondents normally answer using a 0-10 scale, with 10 being “Very Likely” and 0 being “Very Unlikely.” The 0-10 scale makes it easier for you to segment customers according to their responses:

• 9-10 – Promoters (clients who love your company and will actively promote it)
• 7-8 – Passives (customers who like your company but don’t love it yet)
• 0-6 – Detractors (clients who are unhappy with your company and are at risk of churning)

Depending on how many and what kind of answers you get, your NPS score can be somewhere in the -100 and 100 range. Anything under 0 is usually a bad sign, a score between 0 and 30 is normally a good score, a score between 30 and 70 is a great score, and anything over 70 means you have very high loyalty levels.

To calculate your NPS score, you will have to subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. However, there is an easier way to determine it by using specialized NPS software, or sending surveys manually and then compiling the score by using an NPS calculator.

That’s not all, though. The single question must be followed up by an open-ended question – one that asks respondents what made them give that particular score. You can also use other open-ended questions – like asking clients what they didn’t like about your company, or what you can do to improve their customer experience.

Those kinds of questions can offer you more insight into how consumers view your brand, and what actions you need to take to enjoy higher customer satisfaction levels.

Respondents can usually rate their satisfaction with answers in the “Very Satisfied – Very Unsatisfied” range. Alternatively, you can also let respondents rate their answers in the 1-5 or 1-10 range.

Just keep in mind that the closed-ended answers people can give are not set in stone – you can customize them as much as you want to make them more relevant to your brand.

CSAT surveys aren’t limited to a single question. If you want, you can use multiple questions and have open-ended and closed-ended questions in the same survey – like the Hilton Hotels chain does, for instance.

The CSAT score is an average based on the survey results. Generally, these scores are expressed in a percentage – from 0% to 100%.

Here’s an easy way to calculate a CSAT customer satisfaction score – take the number of “Satisfied” respondents (those who answer in the “Satisfied-Very Satisfied” range, or similar parameters), divide it by the number of received responses, and multiply it by 100.

So, if 100 people respond to your survey, and 80 of them are “Satisfied,” that means you’d have an 80% CSAT score.

People who take the survey will get to choose between multiple answers – normally ranging from “Very Difficult” to “Very Easy”. Of course, the answers can vary – they can also be in the “Strongly Agree – Strongly Disagree” range, and they can be numbered as well.

The collected customer feedback is then analyzed to find the average.

If most answers are positive (in the “Easy-Very Easy” category), it means customer satisfaction levels are quite decent for your brand since clients have an easy time using your services/products.

If the answers are negative (in the “Difficult-Very Difficult” category), that means you are in need of improvements to make the interaction with your business easier.

Which Customer Satisfaction Metric Is Better?

NPS – Advantages and Disadvantages

To begin with, NPS offers proper customer segmentation. You can see exactly which types of clients you need to focus your efforts on (Promoters, Passives, or Detractors) to get better results. By consistently analyzing the ratio of Promoters and Detractors, you would be able to get accurate insights about the long-term relationships you are building and whether you’ll be able to grow as quickly as you initially planned.

Besides that, NPS surveys tend to be very accurate. They use a question that’s larger in scope to get unbiased, providing accurate feedback about a product or service. Instead of asking about a specific experience, NPS uses a broad question to inquire on customers’ likelihood to recommend a company as a whole.

The effect is that the score and feedback are less likely to be affected much by particular events. As a result, your business gets specific and meaningful feedback, all with fewer outliers caused by recent positive or negative customer experiences.

Also, NPS is a long-term customer satisfaction metric. NPS focuses on the overall referability of your brand – not just on the individual customer experience. The premise is based on the fact that people are unlikely to refer a brand if they don’t trust it, and if they do refer a brand, they are more likely to stick to it.

Additionally, NPS surveys are accurate and realistic since the sample size should be randomized to cover the entire customer base, and not just the recently active users. It gives a much more realistic perspective of the overall customer sentiment.

One last NPS advantage worth mentioning is that these surveys tend to get a higher response rate. While the average survey has a response rate of just over 3 percent, NPS surveys regularly earn response rates in the 10 to 30% range. It’s usually due to having just one question, and because a numerical scale makes it easy for respondents to offer quick feedback since they don’t have to read any additional text.

And that much-higher-than-average response rate means that even a small NPS survey audience can produce meaningful, statistically significant data that your business can use to improve customer retention and generate more revenue.

Now, in terms of disadvantages, most NPS surveys do require follow-ups, so you can’t really rely just on one single question. Also, good NPS ratings can create a “tunnel vision” effect, where businesses think they’re on the right track, and that’s it.

While a high NPS score is a great accomplishment, you can’t just call it a day after getting the results. You need to act on that score, and start engaging your Promoters to advocate your brand to others, and become even more proactive in addressing the issues faced by the Detractors. NPS works best when paired with a proper voice of the customer program.

CES – Advantages and Disadvantages

The strongest incentive to use CES surveys is the fact that, according to HBR research, the results are a strong predictor of future purchase behavior – given that 94% of consumers who report their interactions with a brand being “low effort” will repurchase.

Also, another research shows that 81% of consumers who report that their interactions with businesses are “high effort” say they would speak about the brand in question in a negative manner. What does that mean? That CES could also give you insights into how likely your customers are to refer you to others. The idea would be that if it’s very easy for them to do business with you, they’d be more likely to promote you.

Lastly, due to the survey’s focus on customer effort, it can offer you actionable data that allows you to quickly pinpoint weaknesses across different types of client interactions with your brand.

Now, onto the drawbacks – one of the main problems with CES is that it doesn’t allow any customer segmentation. Basically, you can’t find out what type of customer had trouble interacting with your product or learn about the kind of relationship you have with a specific customer.

What’s more, you can only find out if clients have trouble using a service or product. You can’t find out why they are having that problem in the first place, and what the exact issue is.

For instance, a customer might feel it was hard for them to get something from your brand that your business doesn’t normally offer. In that case, the CES results show that the said customer had trouble interacting with your business, when – in reality – that kind of information might be irrelevant to you. That’s why it is important to complement the surveys with follow-up questions allowing customers to expand on the problems they encountered using your service.

CSAT – Advantages and Disadvantages

CSAT can be a flexible customer satisfaction metric, which is its strongest suit. You can easily customize questions to make an in-depth analysis of your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. Since the rating scale can be tied to the context, it allows you to use different indicators (like numeric scales, stars, emojis) that appeal to your audience.

Also, CSAT surveys allow you to use different formats – from simple to complex – to engage with your audience. The more thorough formats can be very useful if you have a bigger business (like a hotel chain) and don’t want to bombard customers with multiple one-question surveys.

Now for the drawbacks – the first issue with CSAT is that it only reflects short-term customer sentiment, as the results are normally based on how they are feeling on a given day. There’s also the problem of subjectivity, as “satisfied” can mean different things to different people.

Case in point – there’s the problem of cultural bias. According to a Psychological Science article, people from more individualistic countries (like the US) are likely to choose the more “extreme” sides (“Very Satisfied,” “Very Dissatisfied”) than people in collectivist countries (someone from Japan who’s more likely to offer a “Not Satisfied” or “Satisfied” rating).

Your CSAT score could also be skewed by clients in the “Neutral” or “Dissatisfied” category who might not bother to fill out the whole survey. Not to mention the score could be inaccurate due to fear of admission. Users who rely on your brand’s customer service on a daily basis might be afraid of being honest with the brand – especially if they think that any negative feedback could impact the turn-around time or ongoing business relationship. You can take that fear of the table by using anonymous surveys where respondents can leave their names only if they feel comfortable to.

One last issue to consider with this type of survey is that the CSAT score doesn’t really tell you a lot about consumer loyalty. At best, a low score would be able to predict customer churn.

For instance, having a high score doesn’t mean you can actually predict repeat business. Yes, you can find out if clients are happy with what you offer, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re likely to promote your brand. You can just take a guess, which isn’t a very reliable method.

NPS, CSAT and CES – The Bottom Line

It would be unfair to compare NPS, CSAT and CES as they deal with different aspects of the customer journey. They are connected, complement each other and should be used together at specific stages of the customer lifecycle.

CSAT surveys, despite positive scores, can’t predict customer loyalty, but they can give you helpful information on specific actions and features. CES, on the other hand, offers value in specific situations, such as assessing service performance or a product’s ease of use. These two measure isolated cases at a specific touchpoint, but the feedback will directly contribute to the way you shape your product and guide the customer journey.

Although they usually offer information with short-term relevancy, the results of these surveys should not be underestimated.

For instance, if your customers have difficulties in using a specific product, a quick CES survey with a follow-up question will help identify the issues and solve them promptly. If your customers are dissatisfied with your service, you would want to know it at an early stage. Of course, there is always a possibility that your service isn’t what some users are looking for, so CSAT results will be ambiguous, but a follow-up question will help sort it out. Finally, if your customers aren’t happy with your offering at different stages of their journey, your NPS will be lower.

NPS deals with broader aspects, and hence its appeal. It generates relevant feedback that your business can use to improve consumers’ perception of your brand. NPS does that by asking customers or users a broad follow-up question: “How can we improve?”

Because the standard NPS question isn’t related to a specific experience (like CSAT or CES), respondents are free to talk about the specific things they like or dislike about your product or service.

There’s no forced relevance. Instead, customers are free to provide their honest feedback on any aspect of your product that upsets, frustrates, or disappoints them. They have control over what is and isn’t relevant, and – as a result – can provide meaningful feedback.

The end result is direct and actionable feedback your team can use to make real changes to your product in order to boost retention and increase the monthly recurring revenue.

In addition, NPS has a serious focus on long-term growth. We’ve previously written about why Net Promoter Score is the ultimate growth hacking metric. At its core, it’s simple — there’s no element as closely correlated with long-term, sustainable business growth as customer satisfaction.

Because NPS asks customers how likely they are to recommend your product/service to others, it gives you an accurate view not just of how customers see your product, but how likely they are to help it grow organically.

It also lets you stay on top of growth liabilities, such as the potential for negative publicity from Passives and Detractors that are disappointed or frustrated with your product. By acting quickly to close the feedback loop, it can even prevent you from losing customers.

NPS is the equivalent of taking a pair of blinders off. Not only is the data unbiased and accurate — it’s put into context as an aspect of your business’s growth, helping you to make smarter and more effective decisions.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should disconsider the other metrics. For instance, CES is still a useful way to get direct information about how clients interact with your services and products, and what tweaks you need to make to streamline the experience. You could actually use CES alongside NPS  to measure consumer loyalty and referral marketing alongside how user-friendly your products/services are.

Quick Wins: How to Decide Which CX Metric to Use

• Choose NPS if you want to measure loyalty and track customer advocacy over time. It’s great for identifying trends, assessing overall brand perception and understanding your brand’s long-term relationship with customers.
• Choose CSAT if you need immediate feedback on specific transactions or interactions. It’s ideal for identifying areas that need quick fixes in order to improve individual touchpoints.
• Choose CES if your focus is on reducing friction and streamlining processes. It’s perfect for understanding how easy it is for customers to interact with your business.

While these metrics have different perspectives, they’re most powerful when used together. NPS gives you the big picture, CSAT dives into the details, and CES helps you optimize the journey – creating a comprehensive strategy for improving the customer experience.

The key to success is turning feedback into action. Whether it’s fine-tuning a process based on CES insights, resolving a service issue flagged by CSAT, or nurturing brand advocates identified through NPS, every step you take will drive meaningful results for your business.

Ready to Start Tracking Customer Satisfaction Metrics?

If you want to learn how your brand is perceived by your customers, how satisfied they are with your service and how simple it is to use, you’ll be happy to know it’s quite easy to get started. All you need to do is sign-up for a trial.

It’s extremely user-friendly, you can set up complex automation scenarios with just a few clicks, and fully customize your survey templates to make them better fit your brand’s identity. Don’t forget about the wording – include only the questions that matter, by tailoring them to your specific needs using Retently’s survey maker.

Additionally, you can set up triggers to automatically send out surveys whenever your customers perform a certain action, use segmentation to send targeted surveys, and even integrate numerous other services with Retently.

The post NPS, CSAT and CES – Customer Satisfaction Metrics to Track in 2025 appeared first on Retently CX.

Table of Contents

• 1. Survey Template Personalization
• 2. Email Deliverability
• 3. Survey Audience Tips
• 4. Survey Schedule Tips
• 5. Other Tips

This article provides a list of actionable tips to improve your email survey response rates. Although it was written with Net Promoter Score© in mind, it is applicable to any customer satisfaction – CSAT, CES, regular multiple-choice surveys, etc.

Like every metric that depends on user-submitted data, NPS© gets more accurate as the audience size and survey response rate grow.

If you’re not getting enough responses from your Net Promoter Score campaign, there’s a real risk of your data not offering a full picture of your business’s health and the ability to delight and retain customers.

The regular multi-question survey response rate is just over three percent — a slightly higher value than the benchmark click-through rates for marketing emails. NPS surveys score much over the norm, with an average survey response rate of 30 to 40% for an effective campaign.

Luckily, increasing your NPS response rate and getting more customer feedback (and more meaningful insights) from every delivered survey is surprisingly easy

Below, we’ve shared actionable tactics that you can easily implement with the right NPS software. They’re split into logical sections to cover various aspects of the NPS framework — from template personalization and survey deliverability to audience and schedule.

To jump to a specific section, use the quick links on the left.

Let’s get started!

1. Survey Template Personalization

Nowadays, clients want personalized service from the brands they buy from. Research shows that 79% of customers expect brands to get to know them on a deeper level and provide tailored offers and experiences. That means businesses need to incorporate personalization into every aspect of their client interaction — from email marketing and customer communications to the surveys they send.

1. Survey Branding

One of the first things you’d want to start with is customizing your survey template to fit your company’s brand image.

You may not consider your surveys as a central part of your marketing messaging, but they are to your customers. These emails represent your brand just as much as any other interaction. Personalized surveys must look and sound like your company, so clients don’t get inconsistent experiences when they receive your NPS email in their inboxes.

Add your business logo to assert the legitimacy of your survey, then adjust the colors and styling that represent your brand. Make sure it follows the same concept as your product and advertisements since most people associate a company with their branding colors and style.

2. A/B Test Survey Subject Lines

The average email open rate is 25 percent. This means that if your NPS email is average, only a quarter of your target audience will open and read it, with an even smaller number of respondents bothering to score and provide feedback. Increasing the conversion rate here can make a bigger difference in your bottom line than many other efforts.

The key to achieving a higher open rate — and, as a result, a higher response rate — is to test a variety of email subject lines.

By experimenting with survey subject lines (“Do you have a spare 30 seconds? Please help us improve your experience” versus “Complete our survey!”), you’ll stand out from the hundreds of generic emails that most people receive on a daily basis.

Discovering a good subject line takes time. Aim for a personal and engaging subject line without ever being ambiguous about the content of your email, and you’ll strike the perfect balance between enthusiastic customers and detailed, actionable survey data.

Recommended reading: Cold Email Subject LInes: 16 Best Practices +68 Examples

3. Address Your Customers by Name

You can make your surveys more personal by using custom variables.

Survey template variables allow you to include information about the customer, such as their name, email address, or any other custom properties you’ve stored about that client.

Add them to the survey email subject or body and address your customer by name, further mentioning their company.

Important, do not forget also to add fallbacks to variables in order to handle the situation where that particular contact doesn’t have a value in the field you’ve chosen.

At Retently, we did a study based on 100,000 surveys sent by our clients and concluded that survey B, in the image below, gets a 30% higher open rate than survey A.

4. Personalize Open-Ended Questions

Experiment with the standard NPS rating question and adjust the Open-ended question. Tailor it to particular customer groups – by subscription, lifecycle stage, industry, etc. – and customize the survey accordingly. The more targeted your survey templates are, the higher the response rate is.

So, simply learn more about your customers and make sure your messages are witty enough to give them a second thought about participating in your surveys.

Recommended reading: 20 Great NPS Survey Question and Response Templates

5. Send the Survey in Your Customers’ Language

Regardless of the channel you opt for sending your surveys, make sure to address your clients in their native language.

When you want to survey customers from different geographical areas, it’s important to change the language of the rating and the follow-up questions.

Since you aim to benefit from an increased response rate and get the most out of the customer feedback, you must make sure your message is at least understood by the ones approached. If you stick solely to the default options and ignore the fact that some of your clients require a customized NPS survey in a specific language, you risk not receiving any feedback whatsoever.

Business is international; SaaS companies serve customers from all around the world. Thus, the touchpoints must be customized accordingly.

6. Make Your Mobile Survey Template Look Great

In a world where mobile dominates, responsive design has become the standard. Approximately 68% of all online traffic is mobile, making it essential for your survey template to look great on mobile devices.

When you send an email survey or display it in your web application (in-app), you have no control over which devices your respondent will use. You have to make sure your NPS survey can be completed anytime and on any device.

Not sure if you’re doing it right? Run your survey template through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see how responsive and mobile-friendly your survey is.

7. Fewer Survey Questions

Make your survey as simple as possible, as tempting as it might be to add other survey questions!

At Retently, we regularly received requests from our customers asking to add more survey questions but had to refuse them for quite a while.

If there’s one thing users hate, it’s an overly long survey. Did you know that survey response rates can drop by 30-50% after the initial two or three questions? Luckily, Net Promoter Score makes this a non-issue by only asking respondents a single question before requesting their qualitative feedback.

Customers will naturally back out of surveys that appear to require a lot of time. Show them how easy it is to complete them, and you’ll notice a measurable increase in your survey completion and response rates.

2. Email Deliverability

Poor email reputation directly impacts deliverability, slowing down your NPS campaigns and sending them to spam folders. An excellent sender reputation helps deliver more surveys to your customers’ inboxes without delay. In addition, many of the techniques for improving sender reputation will make NPS emails more engaging, increasing the open and click-through rates.

The best NPS tools will allow you to send the surveys from your own domain and even offer a dedicated email-sending IP address. As you are the only one sending emails over this IP, your sender reputation is shaped solely by your activity.

Recommended reading: Email Deliverability: Avoiding the Spam Folder

8. Send Your Surveys From a Real Person

One of the biggest NPS mistakes you can make is sending your survey from a generic email.

If you’ve ever received an email from an address like no-reply@acme.com, you’d know why — the more generic an email address seems, the more likely you are to trash it immediately.

Instead of using a generic email address, configure your NPS service to send the survey from an email belonging to a real person. This way, customers will see that you’re reaching out with a personal survey instead of automatically sending a generic email to a large audience.

The sender’s details are important because many people will not open an email if they don’t recognize who it’s from.

Of course, if they are being sent from the Boss or the account executive responsible for that specific customer group, the impact will be more visible. The user is more likely to open the email if they see a person’s name, ideally the head of the company (e.g., “John Doe, CEO @ Acme Inc”).

9. The Anita-Effect

Take into consideration the Anita-effect, which suggests that, within a male-dominated business, open rates are higher when the sender is a female.

Although the effect is not proven scientifically, getting a chance to test it on the grounds of your own surveys is definitely worth giving it a try. Probably many would argue the theory, defining it as sexist or based on particular gender stereotypes and attitudes, while others will look at it as another opportunity or attempt to increase the survey response rate and bring in more business.

10. Send the Survey From Your Company Domain

Most Net Promoter services send the surveys from their own domains or mask the sender’s email, which is still insufficient to provide a better email delivery rate.

Survey credibility is one of the first things respondents look at. By having your survey sent from your domain, respondents feel safer that their answers are received by the business they trust and that the collected information won’t be misused.

11. Setup SPF, DKIM, and DMARC Records

DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) protocols allow email service providers (ESPs) like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to filter incoming messages for spam or spoofed email addresses. The protocols verify the source of the incoming message, and if passed, the email will reach the intended recipients’ inboxes.

One quick method to improve your email delivery rates is to incorporate SPF and DKIM into your DNS settings. With this addition to your DNS entries, you’re telling recipients that you’ve authorized your NPS provider to send emails on your behalf. Without this change, your email is more likely to be marked as spam since it was addressed from your domain but sent from an IP address operated by your NPS service.

12. Send Your Surveys From a Dedicated IP Address

An IP address is a numerical label, a “digital label” assigned to a computer connected to the Internet.

A shared sender IP address is when multiple companies use the same IP to deliver their emails. They all share one IP address.

A dedicated IP allows you to digitally sign your emails and take full control of your sending reputation.

We recommend using a dedicated IP address for businesses doing high-volume sending. There are several advantages to opting for a dedicated IP, as the below:

• You are entirely in control of your IP’s reputation;
• Your emails will be signed with the domain or subdomain configured in your NPS service (SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentications), with no other 3rd party domains displayed;
• Certification services such as SenderScore Certified (now Validity), helping your survey emails to bypass the anti-spam filters, usually require a dedicated IP address;
• It facilitates being whitelisted with Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail.
• You should not send more than 1,000 surveys per day unless you have a dedicated infrastructure and IP addresses supporting that.

13. Clean Your Email List

The quality of your respondents’ list is decisive for the success of your survey. With an audience that is genuinely engaged with your business, having a much higher response rate is an undoubted assurance.

Maintain the quality of your clients’ list by regularly cleaning them with specialized services like Neverbounce or their free alternatives.

Do your best to avoid surveying people who are not expecting it. Take a closer look at your bounce reports, import email suppression lists into your NPS software and regularly unsubscribe inactive customers.

Recommended reading: 7 Email List Hygiene Best Practices for a Fresh and Clean List

3. Survey Audience Tips

No client is equal, and each NPS email must craft the audience carefully based on various factors, among which are the customer lifecycle stage, industry, position, etc.

Do not send all your customers the same NPS email!

14. Segment Customers; Don’t Survey Too Early

Timing is not just about asking the right questions; it’s also about segmenting users based on their current customer lifecycle stage and wisely triggering surveys to reach only the targeted segment.

For instance, if you ask newly signed-up users how they find the overall product experience, they’ll mostly ignore the survey and move on (because they just don’t know it yet!).

On the other hand, if you capture feedback from customers after their first product interaction (post-activation), chances are that a large percentage of users will happily engage and share their honest feedback.

In other words, you need to understand your customer’s positioning before you pop the survey, as there’s no point in gathering feedback from customers who have barely had a few interactions to form an opinion.

15. Prevent Them During a Call or Quarterly Business Review

To increase the number of responses, try notifying your customers about the forthcoming survey. Customer Success Managers can do that during their regular quarterly business review with the client.

Studies concluded that pre-notification can increase survey response rates by 4 to 29%. Thus, notifications should be sent or otherwise communicated to clients who are supposed to receive a survey, since research points to lower refusal rates and higher general response.

16. Do Not Survey Unhappy Customers

Nothing is more frustrating than providing feedback and feeling that it’s not being listened to. In business, there are always situations when you can’t solve a customer’s issue immediately – either due to a lack of resources or a bug that has been postponed for various reasons, etc.

If you know that a client is unhappy with something you can’t fix in the near future, don’t send them an NPS survey. Never ask for feedback if follow-up can’t be ensured. There is no point in sending a customer satisfaction survey with no action plan in mind. It will just bring frustration and waste the customer’s time. Temporarily unsubscribe these clients from your next NPS campaign.

17. Respect Customers’ Privacy

Even before GDPR – the regulation impacting the way companies store and use customer data – came into effect, businesses worldwide had to maintain practices that were respectful to the client’s data privacy.

People are more reluctant than ever to share personal information, so collect only the minimum amount of data needed. A clear privacy disclaimer in your NPS email footer will make people more likely to answer your customer satisfaction mails honestly. Thus, you will witness a positive effect on the average survey response rate.

Your privacy disclaimer, which must be part of your survey email, needs to include the following information:

• Collected personal data
• Use and disclosure of such personal data
• Contact information for particular clarifications or adjustments
• Ability to change or delete their personal information

4. Survey Schedule Tips

Here are some general rules that will help you do it right until you find a schedule that works best for you.

The first survey should be sent after your new customer has interacted with your business, approximately within the first 7 to 30 days – a sufficient time span for them to form an opinion about your product.

Quarterly or even bi-annual recurring surveys are the ones to follow. These time intervals seem to strike the best balance of regular feedback and convenience for customers, while still allowing you to monitor if customer satisfaction has changed during their lifecycle.

In the meantime, transactional surveys are the ones keeping a pulse on particular client interactions with your business. They are usually meant to assess the health and efficiency of specific processes (e.g., customer service, the purchasing process, online transactions, etc.).

18. Send Your Surveys at the Right Time

It is important to keep in mind that the time you send out your survey is one among many factors that determine the response rate of your survey.

According to Smart Insights, 23.63% of all email opens occur within the first hour of delivery, with the rate dropping to as low as 4.8% by the fourth hour and 0.63% by the 24th hour. Your NPS email is competing with people’s personal or business emails, as well as with lots of spam and marketing newsletters.

Therefore, it’s crucial to pick the right time to send your surveys and make sure your customers will answer them. Most marketers believe that emails sent between 8-10 am are the most likely to be opened and read by customers, with the 8 pm to midnight time slot being another top performer.

An important feature you’ll want and need in an NPS tool is the ability to schedule your surveys so that they reach your customers at the most effective time possible, based on their timezone – called smart-send or survey timewarp.

19. Do Not Over-Survey Your Audience

The opposite of surveying your customers once and then forgetting to engage them further is surveying them too often. By sending your survey every few weeks, you’re more likely to alienate your customers than generate any meaningful feedback. For instance, Delta Air Lines and Starwood Hotels ask their customers for feedback on every flight and every stay. Isn’t that too much?

Rather than asking customers for feedback at every touchpoint, set parameters on how often it makes sense for you to survey. For instance, at Retently, we engage our clients once per quarter. The goal is to get an NPS response every six months. So if a client responds, he is skipped in the next recurring campaign. If he doesn’t reply, we’ll go ahead and survey him next quarter.

Your survey frequency should be tailored to your customer interactions and business model without becoming an annoyance. Whether you’re running a subscription-based software service, an ecommerce marketplace, or a service-focused business, every customer journey is unique, but they all share a common goal: advocacy.

Note: Dig deeper into the ecommerce & retail buyer journey or SaaS customer journey to learn how to leverage CX surveys at key touchpoints. 

But what is the right number of users to survey in a particular NPS campaign? This would much depend on what you are after: a statistically significant NPS to benchmark and report on or running a continuous voice of the customer program.

Measuring your NPS: The easiest way is to survey enough customers to get an NPS that is statistically significant. The number of respondents you need to sample will depend on how many clients you have.

Voice of the Customer: Customer-centric organizations may opt to survey all customers, collecting feedback and closing the loop. There are two sampling strategies: all customers at once or over a period of time.

All-customers-at-once surveying is the classic campaign approach, sending a quarterly or bi-annual NPS emails to all customers. This is fine when you have a relatively small number of customers and need a quick reading on the score.

A more favored approach is surveying all customers over a period of time in order to keep a constant pulse on customer satisfaction. If you used to send a quarterly survey to 3,000 customers at once, you would rather opt for surveying 1/3 of the subscribers or 1,000 over a whole month. This way, all 3,000 would be surveyed each quarter.

In addition, you should be able to set up other scheduling rules, such as:

• Daily survey limit: a cap on the number of surveys you can send per day.
• Survey throttle: ensures the same person is not over-surveyed if present in multiple campaigns (relevant for companies running regular NPS campaigns, mixed with transactional surveys).

Whatever schedule you go for, one must respect the golden rule: do not over-survey your customers! Getting them annoyed will result in quite the opposite: your score will drop, even if you have the best product on the market.

Recommended reading: Feedback Fatigue: Stop Over-Surveying Your Customers

20. Do Not Send More Surveys Than You Can Process

Survey your respondents no more than you can digest the customer feedback, respond to your customers, and develop an action plan. The effort becomes pointless if you do not have enough time to analyze the customer responses, understand your customer experience, and set forth the next steps for improvement.

Inundated with data, you will find it impossible to read and respond to each customer in a timely manner. Make sure to have enough manpower to cope with the responses and that your team is able to act on that feedback efficiently.

Otherwise, automate the process, trigger different auto-reply messages for Promoters and Passives, and manually approach the Detractors. If your NPS software doesn’t support this function, you can integrate it using a service like Zapier.

5. Other Tips

Not everything fits nicely into neat little boxes (ahem, categories). BUT that doesn’t mean those things aren’t important!

So, here are a few miscellaneous tips that you shouldn’t ignore.

21. Consider Offering an Incentive for Respondents

As a general rule, incentives should be avoided for surveys and studies, since even a relatively small one can influence a respondent’s opinion and result in inaccurate data.

Yet, if your NPS response rate is low and other tactics don’t work, adding a small incentive for users to complete your survey can be an easy way to generate more feedback. A variety of data shows that incentives can increase survey response rates by 5 to 20 percent. These could be a discount, a giveaway, or an account credit.

Basically, the participant is more likely to get involved when the participation reward outweighs the cost. The average increase in response rates when offering incentives was 19.1 percent for monetary and 7.9 percent for non-monetary rewards. Incentives don’t have to be expensive to positively impact the amount of received feedback. Keep it small, and you will boost your response rate without hurting the quality of your data.

Recommended reading: How to Turn a High NPS Into Reviews and Referrals

22. Use a Survey Channel That Suits Your Audience

One of the biggest advantages of Net Promoter Score is its simplicity. Because NPS is a single-question survey, it’s easy to incorporate it into any communication channel, from email to a web application.

A simple way to improve your response rate is to survey customers using a channel that matches their habits:

• If you communicate with your customers via email, you’ll generally get the best response rate by emailing them your NPS survey;
• If your product is a SaaS service, you’ll get a higher response rate by running an in-app NPS campaign;
• If your product is a mobile app, you’ll normally get the highest response rate by incorporating your survey into the app, using a mobile SDK.

The channel you use to communicate with your customers greatly impacts your response rate. Choose the right one or combine them for a better result, and you’ll maximize your survey’s visibility and generate the highest possible response rate from your target audience.

Recommended reading: What is the Best Channel for Your Customer Surveys – Email, SMS or Pop-Up?

23. Send Survey Reminders

Some of your respondents, when initially receiving the survey, will not complete it right away and may forget about it later. To maximize the survey output, you can remind this portion of your audience about the need to complete the survey. It is recommended to send no more than two or three reminders to avoid irritating your customers. Also, make sure not to send reminders to those who’ve already completed the survey and leave an option to unsubscribe for those not interested in taking it.

Here’s an interesting fact: sending a friendly reminder to complete your survey between 3 to 7 days can increase the response rate by up to 14%.  And guess what? If you’re worried about customers getting annoyed and unsubscribing because of these reminders, don’t be. On average, only 0.5% of them will actually unsubscribe. The advantage of a 14% boost in responses is well worth the tiny cost of a 0.5% unsubscribe rate.

Reminders are not designed to convince users to complete the survey but are meant to give those who didn’t have time during the initial launch a second nudge to participate. This being the case, the effectiveness of your reminders will depend almost entirely on the survey schedule.

24. Process the Auto-Replies

We’ve all seen this kind of auto-replies when sending regular emails to our contacts. Have you ever wondered how your NPS service handles them?

Most do nothing. A great survey service will let you know and provide a few options:

• Unsubscribe a contact who changed his job. This will improve the quality of the respondents’ list and, therefore, the survey response rate;
• Resend the survey in a few days or weeks to still get it delivered, thus boosting deliverability.

25. Show Gratitude and Take Action

Act on the received feedback. Otherwise, there might be no next time and your surveys will get nothing but ignored.

Say thank you – it’s the cheapest and easiest tip. Show gratitude for customer time and for their feedback. Not only will it nurture a positive experience with your business, but it will also boost participation in future surveys. Here are a couple of nice outros:

• With your feedback, we’ll make your experience even better!
• Thanks for helping us out, you’re amazing!
• Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey.

Note: For more ideas, make sure to check out our article 25 Top “Thank You for Your Feedback” Responses for Improved Customer Relations.

Expressing gratitude to your customers for their time and efforts is a must since it shows the value of their feedback for you and encourages further fruitful interactions.

Recommended reading: Closing the Customer Feedback Loop: Turn Insights into Action

26. Choose the Right NPS Service and Automate Everything

Since NPS is a simple concept, it can be tempting to create and deliver your survey using a regular email client or send a basic NPS email with services like SurveyMonkey or Typeform. While doing so might save you a few dollars a month, it’s likely to cost you valuable time and resources that are better spent running your business.

A specialized service will provide a bunch of survey templates, useful reports, and automation capabilities. Also, advanced NPS products give the possibility to automatically send surveys based on specific customer touchpoints and even initiate conversations and close the feedback loop.

Recommended reading: Choose the Best NPS Software for Your Business

And that’s that!

Got any cool tips you would like us to add to the list? Leave us a comment and we’ll consider including them in this article!

The post 26 Actionable Tips to Improve Your Survey Response Rate appeared first on Retently CX.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Is the Customer Journey?
  • What Is a Customer Journey Map?
• What are Customer Journey Touchpoints?
  • How to Identify Customer Touchpoints
  • How to Categorize Customer Touchpoints
• What’s the Key to Optimizing Customer Touchpoints?
  • How Does Feedback Actually Help?
  • How to Collect Relevant Feedback for Your Touchpoint Map
• The Bottom Line

Research from Vision Critical highlighted that the total annual cost of unhappy customers for businesses could reach a staggering $537 trillion. More recent data estimates a global loss of $3.7 trillion in 2024 due to bad customer experiences – a more grounded figure 10 years later, yet still striking​.

And if those numbers aren’t a huge concern, consider this – it normally takes 12 positive experiences to make up for just one negative interaction. What’s more, it seems that 64% of customers leave a brand because of poor experiences, and 81% of those switches could have been prevented if businesses acted differently.

Why are customer unhappiness levels so high? It’s likely because many brands don’t understand consumers. At least, that’s what around 80% of clients say. We believe that happens because not enough businesses use a customer journey map to keep track of clients’ desires, needs, and behaviors – basically, the kind of information that can help you prevent high customer churn rates.

Key Takeaways

• A customer journey map shows the entire experience customers have with your brand. It outlines every step they take, helping you understand and improve how they interact with your business.
• Customer touchpoints are the moments when customers interact with your brand. Improving these touchpoints – whether before, during, or after a purchase – is essential to creating a better overall experience.
• Collecting customer feedback allows you to figure out which parts of their experience is lacking. Listening to their input and making changes leads to happier customers and better results.
• Tools like website analytics, social media polls, surveys, interviews, and usability tests are great ways to capture insights. They help you understand what customers like and what needs to be improved.

What Is the Customer Journey?

A standard customer journey definition describes it as all the experiences consumers go through when interacting with a brand from the moment they hear about it to the actual purchasing experience and post-purchase interactions.

To better visualize it, think of it as a roadmap of the full customer experience.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

Simply put, it’s a template that illustrates the entire customer journey. It’s typically used to display it so that every department in your company can easily keep track of the whole customer experience.

Using customer journey mapping is paramount, as it lets everyone in your company visualize how someone becomes a client, and gives them a better understanding of how to improve the process. Not only will key decision-makers have an easier time focusing on customers, but a customer journey map will also help you make each step of the buying experience much more convenient for your leads.

How you create the customer journey map does depend on the way your business operates, but most customer journey mapping examples are based on a standard 4-stage graphic:

1. Inquiry – This is the stage when clients start asking about your brand/product/service, usually by researching it online, checking out your website, or just sending you an email/social media message.
2. Comparison – This is when leads use all the information they were offered to compare your product/service with your competitors’. They check things like pricing, ratings, features, etc.
3. Purchase – This is the moment leads become customers by buying your product/service either online or offline.
4. Installation – Often considered as the second part of the Purchase stage, this is when your product/service is implemented (either with the help of your support team or without it), and when the customer acknowledges whether or not they are satisfied with it (which affects their likelihood of becoming a repeat and loyal client).

If you feel the graphic is missing some customer journey steps that go into your business-client relationship, feel free to edit it as you see fit.

Also, please keep in mind that no customer journey map template is set in stone. It’s not static, and it can change depending on how your business needs and client base grow. Consumer demands and behaviors can also influence your customer journey map. For example, as more and more consumers start using voice search to look up businesses, your customer journey template will need to be tweaked to reflect the new ways of interaction with your brand and any potential voice search technology integrations.

To make the whole mapping process simpler and less time-consuming, you could try to use some customer journey mapping tools. According to our findings, these are the most common and popular ones:

• Miro – A versatile tool that simplifies customer journey mapping by offering real-time collaboration and a range of templates to visualize and improve customer touchpoints.
• SuiteCX – A user-friendly CEM platform that comes equipped with ready-to-go customer journey mapping visualization templates.
• Smaply – A CEM software that uses maps and graphical tools to make the customer journey more visible and easy to act on.
• UXPressia – A visual tool for creating journey maps, personas, and impact maps with real-time collaboration features.
• Clarabridge (now fully integrated into Qualtrics CX) – A useful Customer Experience Management platform that can help you improve the customer journey with relevant feedback.

We recommend checking out each one to see which tool works best for your business needs.

Lastly, when creating a customer journey map, always focus on these aspects to make it as accurate as possible:

• Take the customer’s perspective into account – the customer journey has to be viewed through the client’s eyes, not your company’s eyes.
• When setting up your customer journey map, don’t forget to use customer analytics to better predict consumer behavior.
• Always remember not all clients are the same – account for different customer segments that might experience your brand in different ways.
• Make sure your customer journey map adequately reflects all customer journey touchpoints.

What are Customer Journey Touchpoints?

Customer touchpoints are moments when a client interacts with your brand throughout the customer journey map. It can be any moment, and it can happen before, during, or even after a purchase. Examples of customer touchpoints include visiting your website or your physical store, contacting your customer support, or checking your ratings online. Each of these moments are critical in shaping the overall customer experience.

Why are we dedicating a whole section to customer touchpoints when the concept behind them is pretty simple? Because understanding customer touchpoints is essential to creating a proper customer journey map since it lets you focus on every interaction with your brand, and tweak it to the point where you’re building a memorable, pleasant experience for each stage of the customer journey.

Don’t forget – a positive customer experience is directly tied to your bottom line with 86% of consumers saying that they are willing to pay more for a better experience. Because of that, some would even argue identifying touchpoints is the first step in the process of creating an impactful customer journey map.

How to Identify Customer Touchpoints

The easiest way to identify a customer touchpoint is to focus on the 5 general stages a customer might go through when engaging with your brand, and all the interactions associated with each stage:

1. Brand Awareness – This is when the lead knows about your brand but has no interest in spending money on it. Common touchpoints include PR, advertising (both online and offline), social media exposure, search engine interactions, and top-of-the-funnel content.
2. Consideration – At this stage, the lead is debating whether or not to purchase from you. Customer touchpoints right now would include landing pages, Knowledgebase content, webinars, free trials, product/service demos, testimonials, discounts, and Q&A sessions.
3. Making a Purchase – The moment you’ve been waiting for – turning a lead into a customer. Your checkout page and process, account creation process, and physical store interactions would be some of the main touchpoints.
4. Using the Product/Service – Pretty self-explanatory. Customer touch point examples here include customer support, support articles, every aspect of the service/product itself, and potential interactions on social media with your brand.
5. Brand Loyalty – If the product/service experience was positive and the customer is satisfied with your brand, they will likely become loyal and promote your business. At this stage, touchpoints include newsletters, loyalty programs, personalized social media/email interactions, personalized rewards, and private Q&As or demos of future features/products.

It’s usually a good idea to have a list of all the potential places and times a customer would interact with your brand during each stage.

Another way to identify touch points is to emphasize any interactions that can take place before, during, and after a purchase:

• Before Purchase – Ratings/reviews, customer testimonials, marketing, advertising, PR, and community involvement.
• During Purchase – Website and landing page interactions, sales team/staff interactions, POS/online checkout interactions, discounts, and promotions.
• After Purchase – Follow-ups, transactional emails, customer support, newsletters, social media/email interactions, billing, thank-you cards/emails.

Both methods are useful, but we think the first 5-stage method is more in-depth and provides a better, more segmented view of the customer touchpoint map.

And as generic as this advice might sound, putting yourself in your customer’s shoes is also a great way to identify touchpoints. Just consider things from their perspective and list every step they would take to engage with your brand. Better yet, go through the entire process yourself – exploring, buying and using your product or service. Make sure you try out different channels (in-store/POS, email, online, mobile) since 90% of consumers expect consistent interactions with brands across multiple channels.

How to Categorize Customer Touchpoints

Categorizing touchpoints can make it easier to track them, and also helps with finding new ones you might have overlooked. Generally, it’s enough to use 4 categories to segment customer journey touchpoints:

• Products – It includes everything from actual hardware to software and the services you offer. Your website also falls into this category since it’s important to understand how consumers view and interact with your offerings online.
• Interactions – This category covers all two-way engagements like face-to-face interactions at a physical store, phone calls, or virtual interactions on social media, your website, blog, via email, etc.
• Messages – Anything that establishes a one-way communication between your brand and clients (online/offline advertising, introductory/educational content, brand image) falls into this category.
• Settings – This category includes any place where your product/service is seen or used, like physical stores, consumers’ homes, product placement ads, display cases, and so on.

Of course, if you think tweaking these categories or adding new ones would help, you should go ahead and do it.

What’s the Key to Optimizing Customer Touchpoints?

The best way to optimize your touchpoint map and make it more consumer-centric is to collect and act on customer feedback. It’s pretty obvious, actually. Who else can best tell you how to offer a seamless customer experience other than your actual clients and potential customers?

How Does Feedback Actually Help?

Asking clients and leads the right questions at the right time will offer you all the insights needed to optimize every touchpoint to the point where consumers are having a pleasant, engaging experience. You get to find out exactly which customer touchpoints need tweaking and what changes will boost satisfaction rates.

Here’s an interesting fact – according to Gartner’s research (a leading research and advisory company), collecting and analyzing customer feedback was the first step in customer experience-centric projects back in 2015. That alone should showcase just how important feedback is for improving the customer experience and – consequently – the customer journey map.

How to Collect Relevant Feedback for Your Touchpoint Map

While there are a dozen approaches you can try, our research shows that these are the most efficient feedback collection methods:

• Website Analytics – They can tell you a lot about which pages perform best and which type of content and landing pages have a large bounce rate (meaning they’re making customers/leads leave). Heat maps can further help you refine your website design to make it more appealing.
• Social Media Polls – Use polls to ask your clients what changes or new features/products they’d like to see for a smoother experience. It’s a quick and interactive way to gather valuable feedback.
• Satisfaction Surveys – They allow you to directly ask customers and leads how you can improve their experience. You can use them at any stage of the customer journey to gather specific insights.
• Customer Interviews – Though less common nowadays, one-on-one interviews are still a good source of feedback. They are pretty in-depth and let you capture genuine reactions. Also, they’re usually conducted with loyal clients, making the feedback particularly meaningful.
• Usability Tests – Usability tests can be run during each stage of product development, and can offer a lot of valuable insight. Just keep in mind that usability tests are performed on a carefully-selected focus group, and they tend to be a bit expensive.

The Bottom Line

To avoid losing potential profit, it’s very important to visualize the customer experience with a customer journey map and make sure you meet the needs of all potential clients. When coming up with such a map, one of the most important aspects to focus on is customer touchpoint marketing – the key to improving every interaction a lead and customer have with your brand to ensure they are fully satisfied.

To get good results and properly optimize customer journey touchpoints, we highly recommend collecting and analyzing as much feedback as possible. The best way to offer your client base and leads an amazing experience is to let them tell you what they want, and act on it, after all.

Ready to take your customer experience to the next level? Try Retently  in a free trial and start collecting valuable feedback throghout the customer journey!

Remember, every touchpoint is an opportunity to build trust, loyalty, and long-lasting relationships. Act on the captured insights and watch your brand grow with happier, more engaged customers at every step of the way.

The post How to Create Your Customer Journey Map and Optimize the Touchpoints appeared first on Retently CX.

Table of contents

• Key Takeaways
• What is Customer Support Quality Assurance?
• 1. Retently as a Top QA Tool for Ecommerce and Retail
• 2. Medallia Agent Connect (former Stella Connect)
• 3. Loris AI
• 4. Playvox
• 5. MaestroQA
• 6. Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus)
• 7. EvaluAgent
• Final Thoughts: Choosing the Right QA Tool

When customer interactions lack consistency and quality, it can lead to dissatisfaction, lost loyalty, and even negative reviews. The challenge lies in ensuring that every touchpoint across all channels meets the high standards your customers expect. This is where Quality Assurance tools come into play—they help pinpoint inconsistencies, monitor agent customer service performance, and highlight areas for improvement.

QA tools enable you to monitor interactions in real-time, automate support quality control, and provide actionable insights that ensure your team delivers a seamless experience every time. By integrating these tools into your operations, you transform routine customer exchanges into opportunities for building stronger relationships and driving better outcomes.

Ready to tackle these challenges head-on? Let’s explore the best Customer Service Quality Assurance tools that can elevate your customer experience to the next level.

Key Takeaways

• QA tools are crucial for keeping customer service top-notch, ensuring consistent and high-quality interactions that drive satisfaction and loyalty.
• With real-time monitoring and automated quality checks, these tools help brands quickly spot and fix issues, enhancing overall customer support.
• Quality Assurancetools are versatile, offering customizable features like scorecards and sentiment analysis to suit various business needs and optimize service quality.
• As your business grows, Quality Assurance tools scale effortlessly, helping you maintain high standards and transform customer interactions into opportunities for building stronger relationships and achieving better results.

What is Customer Support Quality Assurance?

Customer support quality assurance (QA) is the process of ensuring that every interaction your customers have with your service team meets high standards. It’s about more than just solving problems—it’s about creating a consistently positive experience that builds trust and keeps customers coming back.

To achieve this, businesses use customer support Quality Assurance software. These tools, often called conversation review or customer support quality management software, help monitor customer interactions, train, and onboard agents, and continuously refine support operations. The goal is simple: to ensure that every customer interaction is handled with care, professionalism, and efficiency.

Using QA software in your custom can streamline and elevate service quality with a clear process. Here’s how quality assurance works:

1. Set Clear Standards:
Define what excellent service looks like for your business, ensuring that every agent adheres to these benchmarks.

2. Monitor Interactions:
Use Quality Assurance tools to track customer interactions, identifying areas for improvement. These tools are essential for maintaining consistency in tone, language, script adherence, and escalation procedures.

3. Evaluate Performance:
Assess how well your team meets the established standards. QA tools can automate this process, providing real-time feedback and scoring.

4. Provide Feedback and Training:
Regular feedback and coaching help agents improve, ensuring consistent quality across the board. Training and development are crucial for keeping all agents aligned with company standards.

5. Continuous Improvement:
Quality Assurance is an ongoing process. Tools help scale your efforts as your business grows, ensuring that your quality assurance processes can handle increasing complexity.

This approach, fueled by QA software, empowers your team to consistently deliver exceptional service, building stronger customer loyalty along the way.

Now that you know the importance of QA in customer service, let’s dive into the top 7 tools we’ve handpicked specifically for Ecommerce and Retail businesses to enhance your support operations.

1. Retently as a Top QA Tool for Ecommerce and Retail

Retently provides a streamlined approach to managing customer experience and Quality Assurance, making it a valuable tool for teams in helpdesk settings.

Focusing on key CX metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES, it helps brands gain critical insights into customer interactions while ensuring support teams consistently deliver top-quality service.

Retently’s QA features make it easy to track agent performance and address issues before they escalate, allowing for continuous improvement. Powered by AI-driven feedback classification and sentiment analysis, the platform enables teams to categorize and understand customer feedback in real-time, identifying key concerns early on and addressing them proactively. 

With Retently, brands can stay ahead of client expectations and drive meaningful improvements to their customer service operations.

Key Features:

• Performance Dashboard: Track agent performance trends over time, making it easy to monitor progress and adjust as needed.
• Collect Customer Feedback at Scale: Send customer surveys after service interactions, gathering ratings through stars, scales, or emojis. Retently categorizes feedback by topic and sentiment automatically, giving your team valuable insights at a glance.
• Feedback Loop Management: Agents and team leads can automate or manually manage feedback responses using customizable templates and macros, ensuring quick follow-up.
• AI-powered Feedback Classification & Topic Analysis: AI identifies and classifies key feedback topics while analyzing sentiment, helping QA teams quickly spot performance issues and areas for improvement, allowing for timely action before problems escalate.
• Sentiment Analysis: Automatically tag feedback with sentiment indicators, allowing your team to quickly spot emerging issues and take action.
• Helpdesk Integrations: Connect your Gorgias, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Gladly or Kustomer instances to provide better context on customer interactions.
• Slack & Teams Integrations: Integrates seamlessly with Slack, delivering real-time alerts for feedback updates and ticket changes, keeping the team in sync.
• Coaching and Training: Provides tooling for real-time coaching, giving agents the opportunity to improve as they go. Alerts ensure quick response times for feedback and performance updates.

Pricing:

Retently’s plans focus on advanced feedback management tools, allowing businesses to efficiently manage and act on customer feedback. These tools integrate seamlessly with broader CX metrics for a comprehensive view of customer satisfaction. The Basic plan, at $49 per month, is ideal for smaller stores running CSAT surveys, while the Pro plan, starting at $299 per month, adds white-glove support and data migration concierge services.

Best Fit For:

Retently is a perfect match for medium-sized and large Ecommerce brands seeking an easy-to-use, all-in-one tool to manage customer feedback and quality assurance. With its user-friendly features and integrations, Retently helps brandses maintain consistency in customer service, track performance, and address issues before they escalate. Whether you’re looking to automate feedback collection or enhance agent training, Retently provides the tools needed to improve customer experience without overwhelming your team.

2. Medallia Agent Connect (former Stella Connect)

Medallia Agent Connect is the former Stella Connect product, after Medallia has acquired it. While Medallia focuses on a broader spectrum of customer experience management, Agent Connect zeroes in on customer service interactions, providing tools specifically tailored for monitoring, improving, and managing support operations. 

With advanced features like real-time feedback, customizable scorecards, and detailed reporting, Medallia Agent Connect allows brands to maintain high standards of service quality.

The platform excels in handling large volumes of data, capturing insights from surveys, digital feedback, and other channels to give a comprehensive view of customer experiences. With its efficient workflow management and ability to quickly share actionable insights with teams, Medallia Agent Connect ensures that support operations are not only optimized but also scalable, helping brands stay agile and responsive to customer needs.

Main Features:

• Instant Feedback: Provide immediate feedback on critical interactions using message threads and annotations, ensuring timely and relevant guidance.
• Seamless Reviews: Share Quality Assurance reviews with frontline teams quickly, allowing for actionable insights as soon as reviews are completed.
• Comprehensive Reporting: Compare QA data with CSAT metrics to gain a holistic view of agent performance and align coaching efforts with customer experience goals.
• Enhanced Workflow Efficiency: Use advanced annotations and calibration tools to focus on the most impactful interactions, improving overall efficiency in the Quality Assurance process.
• Real-Time Reviews: With Agent Connect, launch Quality Assurancereviews in real-time, making it easier for team leaders to address performance issues as they arise.
• Customizable Scorecards: Tailor scorecards to meet the specific needs of your team, with features like section-based weighting and auto-fail questions.
• Engagement and Motivation: Keep agents engaged through gamification, rewards systems, and seamless integration with ticketing systems.
• Customizable Surveys: Align feedback processes with your brand’s goals using customizable surveys that capture the most relevant insights.

Pricing:

Medallia Agent Connect offers a flexible pricing model tailored to the specific needs of each business. Their pricing is structured around the Experience Data Record (EDR) model, which consolidates all data from a single customer interaction into one comprehensive package. While this approach simplifies budgeting by bundling all related data under a single cost, it can be on the higher end for some businesses. For a detailed quote that fits your unique requirements, it’s necessary to reach out to Medallia Agent Connect directly.

Best Fit For:

Medallia Agent Connect is a great option for brands that need and can afford enterprise-level solutions, offering dedicated customer success management (CSM), personalized onboarding, and ongoing training. It’s especially suited for large brands handling extensive customer data and managing complex operations across multiple channels. 

With its advanced analytics, real-time feedback, and detailed reporting, Medallia helps brands maintain high service quality at scale. If you’re looking for a solution that provides both powerful tools and dedicated support, Medallia Agent Connect is a strong choice.

3. Loris AI

Loris.ai is an AI platform that offers real-time guidance to customer service teams during interactions. It helps agents follow company policies while responding to customers efficiently and accurately.  By analyzing conversations for key topics and sentiment, Loris.ai helps brands refine their customer service approach and enhance overall performance.

Main Features:

• Instant Agent Support: Loris.ai delivers real-time assistance to agents, ensuring they follow protocols while handling customer inquiries.
• Automated QA Processes: The platform uses AI to automatically select and score the most critical customer interactions, minimizing manual work.
• Sentiment and Trend Analysis: Loris.ai’s sentiment analysis provides valuable insights into customer behavior and performance trends.
• Integrated Quality Assurance Management: The platform consolidates all QA activities, from scoring to coaching, in one streamlined interface.
• Efficient Conversation Summaries: Quickly review customer interactions with automated summaries, reducing time spent on manual reviews.

Pricing:

Loris.ai follows a customized pricing model tailored to the specific needs of each business. To receive an accurate quote, potential users should reach out to Loris directly.

Best Fit For:

Loris.ai is ideal for both retail giants and smaller brands looking to optimize their customer service operations. Its AI-driven approach makes it a flexible solution that can scale with the needs of any business, ensuring consistent quality and continuous improvement in customer interactions.

4. Playvox

Playvox provides an AI-infused platform designed to support customer service quality monitoring and workforce operations. With tools that help identify key drivers of customer experience, Playvox also assists teams in managing demand through forecasting and scheduling. By automating the Quality Assurance process, Playvox allows you to focus on actionable insights and continuous improvement rather than manual tasks.

Main Features:

• AI-Powered Quality Management: Move beyond basic Quality Assurance with automated scoring, real-time feedback, and deeper insights into customer sentiment.
• Smarter Workforce Management: Optimize staffing and scheduling with AI-driven forecasts and seamless adjustments as business needs change.
• Comprehensive Sentiment Analysis: Understand the mood and intent behind every customer interaction, helping you improve experiences across all channels.
• Root Cause Identification: Quickly identify underlying issues affecting performance with automated root cause analysis, giving managers the insights they need to act decisively.

Pricing:

Playvox does not provide detailed pricing information on its website, making it necessary for interested businesses to reach out directly for a customized quote. This approach ensures that the pricing is tailored to the specific needs of your customer service operations, but it does mean that prospective users will need to contact Playvox to explore the cost options available.

Best Fit For:

Playvox is particularly well-suited for mid-sized to large ecommerce businesses that manage high volumes of customer interactions across multiple channels. It’s ideal for online retailers that need precise workforce management to handle fluctuating demand, especially during peak seasons.

5. MaestroQA

MaestroQA is a platform that focuses on key areas such as transaction security, sales processes, and customer support. It provides Quality Assurance solutions that help brands address challenges related to security, sales, and support. The platform is designed to secure transactions, improve sales processes, and maintain consistent customer support quality.

Key Features:

• Performance Dashboard: Gain full control over performance excellence with real-time insights.
• Auto QA: Enhance your manual Quality Assurance program by automating routine tasks.
• Screen Capture: Simultaneously capture multiple interactions for a comprehensive view.
• Root Cause Analysis: Delve into the root causes of issues for in-depth insights.
• Coaching: Streamline agent onboarding and improve coaching effectiveness.
• Transcriptions: Provide accurate transcriptions across all channels for thorough QA.
• Leaderboards: Foster a culture of friendly competition to drive performance.
• Scorecard Builder: Customize scorecards to measure what matters most to your business.
• Workflow Automations: Automate agent performance evaluations and assignments effortlessly.
• Calibrations: Ensure alignment with easy-to-use calibration workflows.
• Quality Assurance Reporting: Build custom reports that provide valuable insights into call center QA.
• Customer Experience Team: Focus on maximizing customer satisfaction with targeted efforts.
• Grading Assist Co-Pilot: Use AI to assist with grading within your custom scorecards.
• AI Analytics: Dive deeper into performance insights using advanced AI and GPT prompting.

Pricing:

MaestroQA offers tailored pricing based on your specific business needs. To get a detailed quote, you’ll need to contact them directly through their website.

Best Fit For:

MaestroQA is a universal platform that caters to ecommerce and retail businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re a small brand looking to scale your operations or a large enterprise focused on maintaining high-quality standards, MaestroQA provides the tools needed to enhance security, optimize sales, and deliver exceptional customer support. Its flexibility and scalability make it an ideal choice for brands seeking a comprehensive QA solution that can adapt to their evolving needs.

6. Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus)

Zendesk QA, formerly known as Klaus, uses AI for conversation quality management, offering tools that help businesses monitor and analyze customer support interactions. By automatically assessing conversations involving both human and AI agents, Zendesk QA delivers insights into support performance, allowing teams to identify areas that need improvement. This approach helps brands maintain consistency in support and address issues more effectively.

Main Features:

• AutoQA: Automatically reviews 100% of conversations, including those with AI agents, to identify issues, knowledge gaps, and opportunities for improvement.
• AI Insights: Highlights high-risk interactions, outliers, and potential churn risks, allowing you to focus on what matters most.
• Agent Feedback & Coaching: Provides systematic feedback linked to CSAT scores, enabling targeted coaching and performance improvements.
• Performance Tracking: Offers deep data filtering by department, team, or individual agent, allowing for detailed performance analysis.
• Voice Quality Assurance: Includes quality assurance for voice interactions, ensuring comprehensive coverage across all support channels.
• QA for AI Agents: Evaluates the performance of AI-driven interactions to maintain consistency and quality.

Pricing:

Zendesk QA is available at $35 per agent per month, billed annually. This plan includes comprehensive conversation analysis across all channels, with AI-driven insights and coaching tools. For businesses requiring enhanced data privacy and protection, an additional add-on is available at $50 per agent per month, which includes advanced encryption, data masking, and extended retention policies.

Best Fit For:

Zendesk QA is ideal for brands of all sizes that need a robust, AI-driven quality assurance solution to manage high volumes of customer interactions across multiple channels. It’s particularly well-suited for organizations looking to enhance their customer experience while optimizing operational efficiency.

7. EvaluAgent

EvaluAgent automates Quality Assurance processes for contact centers, providing tools to monitor and assess customer interactions. The platform helps identify high-risk interactions and offers detailed conversation intelligence, enabling teams to focus on performance optimization. With features designed to streamline QA workflows, EvaluAgent assists in reducing manual tasks while providing insights that support informed decision-making in contact center operations.

Main Features:

• Automated QA: Prioritize high-risk interactions with AI-driven automation, reducing manual effort and increasing focus on critical issues.
• Conversation Intelligence: Capture and analyze 100% of interactions across all channels with advanced transcription and sentiment analysis.
• Agent Engagement: Boost agent performance with gamification, real-time feedback, and personalized insights.
• Customizable Workflows: Adapt QA processes to your business needs with flexible scorecard management and automated tagging.
• SmartScore Customization: Tailor scoring to align with your organization’s goals through unlimited automated line items.

Pricing:

EvaluAgent’s pricing is customized to fit your specific needs, including user count and required features. For a detailed quote, you can contact EvaluAgent directly to discuss your goals and obtain a tailored pricing proposal

Best Fit For:

EvaluAgent is ideal for mid-sized to large ecommerce businesses that handle high volumes of customer interactions and need to ensure consistent service quality. Its ability to automate QA processes and provide detailed insights from every interaction makes it particularly well-suited for ecommerce operations where customer experience is critical.

Final Thoughts: Choosing the Right QA Tool

When it comes to selecting the best Quality Assurance platform for your business, the decision hinges on your specific requirements. If you’re looking for a solution that simplifies customer feedback management and QA without the need for intricate enterprise features, Retently is a highly efficient option. It’s ideal for brands that want to cover the essentials of quality assurance, offering easy-to-use tools for feedback analysis, performance monitoring, and sentiment tracking, all within a streamlined interface. Retently is particularly suited for those who need to maintain high service standards without the complexity of enterprise-level software.

However, if your business requires more robust, enterprise-level capabilities, such as extensive data handling or highly customizable workflows, platforms like Medallia Agent Connect may be more suitable. The key is matching your Quality Assurance needs with the right platform that can scale with your operations.

The post Best 7 Customer Service Quality Assurance Software for Ecommerce & Retail in 2024 appeared first on Retently CX.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• Capturing Key Insights: How We Use Retently Across Customer Lifecycle Stages
• Crafting the Perfect Survey: Retently’s Approach and Tips for Success
• Integrations: Streamlining Processes and Data Flows
• Tracking CX  Trends: Unlocking Insights Across Customer Segments
• Turning Feedback into Success With Retently

At Retently, we don’t just talk about the power of customer feedback—we live it. As a leader in customer satisfaction tools, we provide businesses with the means to gather, analyze, and act on critical insights that drive loyalty and growth. Through our CX surveys and advanced feedback analytics, we enable businesses to truly understand their customers and turn that understanding into action.

But here’s the catch—we don’t just help other companies thrive; we rely on our own platform to fuel our success. That’s right, we use Retently daily to sharpen our approach, refine our services, and meet the needs of our clients. 

In this article, we’re pulling back the curtain to show you how we leverage our own product to improve and stay connected with our clients. From perfectly timed surveys to actionable insights, you’ll see how Retently drives our growth—and how it can do the same for you.

Key Takeaways

• We use post-trial and recurring NPS feedback to consistently refine our product and quickly adapt to customer needs.
• Helpdesk CSAT surveys provide insights into support performance and allow us to make adjustments that enhance customer satisfaction after every interaction.
• CES surveys highlight how easily new users adapt to our product, enabling us to smooth out onboarding challenges.
• PMF surveys guide our roadmap and help identify our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), focusing our efforts on must-have features.
• By analyzing trends across customer segments, we adjust our offerings to stay relevant and meet specific customer needs.

Capturing Key Insights: How We Use Retently Across Customer Lifecycle Stages

Using CX surveys effectively goes beyond a one-time effort—it’s about collecting and acting on feedback throughout the customer journey. We’ve fine-tuned our process by strategically deploying surveys after key events, like the end of a free trial or after cancellation. By personalizing questions and automating survey delivery, we gather detailed insights that keep us in sync with our customers’ needs.

Some of these surveys are core to our approach, actively triggered at specific touchpoints or on a recurring schedule to monitor the customer experience. Others are experiments we’ve explored to capture targeted data. No matter which method you choose for your specific use case, know that it’s been thoroughly tested and will deliver the actionable insights you’re after.

Now, let’s explore the types of surveys we’ve leveraged over time to make informed decisions and strengthen customer relationships.

Post-Demo Call Survey: Turning First Impressions into Actionable Insights

The demo call is often the first live interaction a potential customer has with our product, making it a critical touchpoint in the customer journey. To capitalize on this moment, we deploy a Post-Demo Call Survey to capture immediate feedback from prospects while their experience is still fresh. This survey allows us to understand how well the demo resonated with them, whether it effectively showcased the value of our product or addressed their specific needs.

The insights gathered from this survey are invaluable for fine-tuning our sales approach. For example, if feedback suggests that certain features were unclear or that the demo didn’t fully meet expectations, we can adjust our presentation to better align with customer interests. This feedback loop ensures that each demo becomes more targeted and effective, increasing our chances of converting leads into paying customers.

Beyond refining our demo process, the Post-Demo Call Survey also helps us spot potential customer concerns early on. If a prospect expresses hesitation or points out areas where they feel the product falls short, we can immediately address these issues with follow-up communication or additional resources. This proactive approach shows that we’re committed to understanding and meeting their needs right from the start.

Post-Trial NPS: Unlocking the Why Behind Customer Decisions

Every free trial tells a story, whether it ends in a conversion or not. For us, the real value lies in understanding the factors behind both outcomes. After the trial ends, we send a post-trial NPS survey to ask what drives customer decisions. Did our product meet their needs, or did something fall short? This survey helps us dig into the details.

Timing is everything. We’ve mastered sending the survey at just the right moment—after the trial ends but before users disengage. This ensures that their feedback is both reflective and relevant. However, gathering feedback is only the first step. When trial users share their concerns—whether it’s a missing feature, an unclear onboarding process, or another roadblock—we don’t just listen; we take action.

Our follow-up could be a personalized demo, a guide highlighting features they might have missed, or simply directing them to the right resources. The goal is always the same: turn every trial into an opportunity to improve, adapt, and eventually win over more customers.

Understanding why a user didn’t convert during the trial isn’t just about fixing a problem but streamlining the entire experience. Our post-trial NPS survey provides us with the insights needed to keep evolving and ensure that our product exceeds the expectations of future customers.

Post-Onboarding CES Survey: Supporting Every Step of the Journey

Once customers start using our product, it’s important to ensure everyone on the team feels comfortable and equipped to make the most of it. Onboarding isn’t a one-time event—it’s an ongoing process as new team members come and go. To make sure that everyone finds our product easy to use, no matter when they start, we rely on CES (Customer Effort Score) Surveys. These surveys help us understand how smoothly each team member is getting up to speed with our product.

Instead of sending the survey just once, we send it to every new user after they’ve had some time with the product—whether they’ve been using it for a few weeks or are just starting out. This way, we can see how well our onboarding process works for both new and existing users.

If the survey shows someone is struggling, we don’t wait to step in. We adjust our training materials, offer extra help, or share additional resources to help them get the needed support. Our goal is to keep improving the onboarding experience so that it’s smooth and effective for everyone, no matter when they join.

With these CES surveys, we make sure onboarding is always a positive start that sets our users up for success from day one.

We’ve also tested sending CES surveys after key user actions, like setting up integrations or creating their first campaign, and following self-service support interactions, such as using our knowledge base or FAQs. This has helped us ensure that users are not only successfully onboarded but also easily deal with key aspects of our product.

NPS Recurring Survey: Keeping a Pulse on Customer Sentiment

Maintaining a strong connection with our customers requires ongoing engagement. That’s where our NPS recurring survey comes in. Every 180 days, we reach out to users who log into our platform to gauge their satisfaction and keep a pulse on their evolving needs. This semi-annual check-in provides consistent feedback, helping us identify trends, detect potential issues early, and adjust our strategies before minor problems become major challenges.

The beauty of the recurring NPS survey is its ability to track changes over time. By comparing data from previous surveys, we can see how customer sentiment shifts and understand what’s driving those changes. Are users more satisfied as we roll out new features, or are there concerns that need attention? This data allows us to be proactive rather than reactive and keep improving our product.

We also recognize that not all customers engage with surveys in the same way, so we’ve made it easy and convenient to share their thoughts. We use both web in-app surveys and follow-up email reminders to reach customers where they’re most comfortable. If a user doesn’t respond to the in-app survey, we send a reminder via email, giving them another chance to weigh in. Switching to a different survey template for the second attempt also tends to increase engagement.

But the NPS recurring survey isn’t just about gathering scores; it’s about closing the loop. When we receive feedback, especially if it indicates a drop in satisfaction, we take immediate action. Whether it’s reaching out to offer support, address specific concerns, or simply acknowledge their input, we aim to ensure every customer feels heard and valued.

Helpdesk CSAT Survey: A Must for High-Volume Support Teams

When your support team handles a high volume of customer inquiries, ensuring every issue is resolved smoothly is crucial. During busier periods, we’ve made it a priority to send post-support CSAT surveys to get immediate feedback on how well our team is performing. While that is not a primary scenario for us, given the low ticket volume, we know that for many companies, this type of survey is a game-changer. That’s why Retently offers a simple way to set up and automate Helpdesk Surveys for those who need them.

By following up on resolved tickets with a quick survey – typically including a CSAT question – we can ensure that issues are managed efficiently, response times are on point, and customers leave happy. Yet, we don’t just react to inquiries; we also take proactive support steps, such as monitoring common issues and updating the Knowledge Base or FAQs for guidance.

For businesses with a busy helpdesk, this feedback is invaluable. It helps fine-tune support processes and make sure no customer slips through the cracks. By integrating Helpdesk Surveys into the workflow, we can maintain the quality of our service and keep clients satisfied.

While CSAT surveys are most commonly used post-support, they are not limited to that. We’ve tested them in the post-onboarding phase and to evaluate satisfaction with specific feature releases. CSAT surveys served us well in these use cases as well.

Product-Market Fit Survey: Making Sure Our Product Is a Must-Have

How do we know if our product truly hits the mark? That’s the question our Product-Market Fit (PMF) Survey is designed to answer. The PMF Survey is our way of measuring how essential our product is to the people who use it, in order to keep up with their needs and expectations.

In the past nine years, we’ve conducted two Product-Market Fit surveys that have shaped our product roadmap and defined our Ideal Customer Profile. By asking how customers would feel if they lost access to our product and which features they find most valuable, we’ve gained insights into what truly matters to them and how relevant our product is in their daily lives.

Why is this feedback so crucial? Because it tells us if we’re on track or need to make changes. If customers say they’d be very disappointed without our product, we know we’re delivering real value. But if the response is somewhat indifferent, it’s a clear sign we need to step up our game. This feedback directly influences our product development, helping us prioritize the most important features and improvements to our users.

But the PMF Survey isn’t just about identifying gaps—it’s about staying ahead. This process helps us refine our roadmap, ensuring we’re always building something that’s not just useful but indispensable.

Churn Surveys: Identifying Specific Reasons for Customer Departures

Churn Surveys provide detailed feedback from customers who decide to cancel or downgrade their subscriptions. These surveys focus on gathering specific information about the reasons behind their decision. Whether it’s dissatisfaction with certain features, concerns about pricing, or better alternatives on the market, the data we collect helps us pinpoint exactly where things went wrong.

By analyzing these responses, we can identify common patterns and areas that need improvement, such as feature gaps or support issues. This information is crucial for making targeted adjustments to our product, pricing models, or customer service practices to reduce future churn and downgrades.

Additionally, Churn Surveys give us a chance to address unresolved issues and potentially re-engage customers. By following up on their feedback, we may find opportunities to win back their business or at least prevent negative word-of-mouth and improve the experience for other customers moving forward.

Crafting the Perfect Survey: Retently’s Approach and Tips for Success

We’ve learned that the most effective surveys go beyond a single question. While the rating question – whether NPS, CSAT, or CES – is a good start, we dive deeper by including tailored open-ended questions or experimenting with multiple-choice questions to capture insights that numbers alone can’t provide. 

For example, multiple-choice questions are particularly suited in churn surveys, as departing customers are less likely to spend time on detailed feedback. On the other hand, pairing a rating question with a couple of open-ended follow-ups is ideal when you want to dig deeper into customer opinions, such as in PMF surveys.

Yet, most of the time you will find yourself combining them for more nuanced feedback. For instance, you might start with an NPS question like, “How likely are you to recommend our product?” to measure overall loyalty. Next, you could include a multiple-choice question such as, “What do you like most about our product?” with options like pricing, feature set, or ease of use, for an idea of what customers value most. You can then follow up with an open-ended question on future intentions: “What specific improvements would you like to see from us in the future?”. Even if some customers do not share qualitative feedback, the multiple-choice responses will already offer a good understanding of their preferences.

With Retently, you can actually tweak your template to include a variety of questions, but we recommend sticking to the most relevant ones to increase response rates. Annoying customers with too many questions will only reduce the quality of your feedback. We also take our time to customize every aspect of the survey – from branding and colors to buttons and layout – so it aligns perfectly with our brand’s identity.

Our advice? Take full advantage of Retently’s flexibility to craft appealing surveys that blend various question types. Whether it’s understanding what’s working well or identifying areas for improvement, a personalized approach, the right mix of questions and appropriate timing can make all the difference.

By going beyond the basics and A/B testing our approaches with Retently, we manage to keep up with our customer’s needs and deliver meaningful outcomes.

Integrations: Streamlining Processes and Data Flows

We focus on making our feedback collection process as smooth and efficient as possible by connecting Retently with the tools we rely on. This integration helps us handle requests faster and more effectively. Here’s how we do it step by step:

1. Syncing Contacts from Pipedrive:

First, we connect Retently to Pipedrive, our go-to CRM. This integration keeps our customer data up-to-date, automatically syncing contacts to maintain accurate records. This setup allows us to manage and trigger surveys effectively, making sure that our outreach is timely and aligned with customer interactions.

2. Triggering Surveys with Chargebee:

Next, we integrate with Chargebee, our subscription management tool. This allows us to automatically trigger surveys based on key transactions, like when a customer activates a subscription or renews. By tying feedback to these critical moments, we capture insights exactly when they’re most relevant.

3. Using our Google Workspace:

Sending email surveys through our Google Workspace lets us control communication channels while maintaining brand consistency. This approach builds trust with recipients by using a familiar domain and integrates seamlessly with our workflows, simplifying response tracking and follow-ups. Retently’s customers can also leverage the Custom From feature to personalize their own surveys.

4. Exporting Feedback Back to Pipedrive:

Once a survey is completed, we ensure that all feedback data is exported directly back into Pipedrive. This includes not just the survey score but also detailed notes and customer comments. When a customer responds to a survey, a new note is created in Pipedrive, attaching all relevant details to their profile. This means that every team member can easily access the latest feedback and act on it.

We also track customer satisfaction at the organizational level by leveraging our Account CX functionality. For example, when multiple users from the same company complete a survey, we group their responses under the same account. This allows us to see how different users within the same organization feel about our product, giving us a broader view of the company’s overall satisfaction.

The computed account-level CX score is also exported to Pipedrive. This helps us monitor each account’s overall health and proactively address any concerns before they escalate.

5. Real-Time Feedback in Slack:

Finally, we bring it all together with Slack. Survey feedback is sent straight to our Slack, where our product, support and CS teams can review and respond in real-time. This keeps everyone in the loop and ensures that no feedback goes unnoticed.

That’s how we do it, but the beauty of Retently is that you can integrate it with the tools that work best for you. Whether it’s through Zapier or our native integrations with platforms like Salesforce or Hubspot, you can easily connect Retently to the tools that fit your workflow.

Tracking CX  Trends: Unlocking Insights Across Customer Segments

Our CX Trends feature is like a spotlight that reveals how customer satisfaction shifts across different customer segments or product traits. By keeping a close eye on these trends, we gain valuable insights that help us fine-tune our offerings and stay in sync with our customers’ needs. Here’s how we make the most of tracking trends in three key areas:

Customer Tier

We track satisfaction based on subscription tiers or packages. This helps us understand what each group values most and ensures that our plans stay relevant and competitive. By spotting trends in NPS scores and feedback across different tiers, we can adjust our services to better meet the unique needs of each segment. Whether it’s a basic plan or a premium package, we make sure every customer gets the value they expect.

Roles within the Company

Different roles within an organization interact with our product in their own ways. By tracking satisfaction across roles—whether it’s end-users, decision-makers, or technical teams—we can tailor our approach to address each group’s specific needs. This helps us ensure that everyone, from the frontline users to the executives, gets the most out of our product and enjoys a more personalized and satisfying experience.

Industry Segmentation

Each industry comes with its own set of challenges and needs. By tracking trends across the industries we serve, we can spot patterns in satisfaction and adjust our offerings accordingly. Whether a particular industry’s scores are trending up or down, this data helps us stay ahead of the curve and ensure our product continues to hit the mark in key markets.

Turning Feedback into Success With Retently

Over the years, we’ve realized that feedback is more than just data, it’s the core of meaningful actions and lasting success. By eating our own dog food, we’ve consistently refined our strategies, strengthened customer relationships, and enhanced our offerings. The captured insights have allowed us to respond effectively to customer needs and keep our business on a steady growth path.

With Retently, we’ve developed a deeper understanding of what our clients value and where improvements are needed. This ongoing engagement has enabled us to reduce churn, increase loyalty, and consistently deliver more value. By actively listening and adapting based on feedback, we’ve made Retently essential to our success.

Now, we’re excited to help you achieve the same results. Whether your goal is to boost customer satisfaction, refine your product, or stay closely connected with your clients, Retently gives you the tools to make it happen. 

Start your journey with Retently today and see how it can transform your business. Leverage our free trial and see firsthand how customer feedback can drive your success.

The post How Retently Uses Retently: A B2B SaaS Guide appeared first on Retently CX.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Is a Detractor?
• How to Identify Detractors
• How Detractors Can Ruin Your Business?
• How Much Time Do You Have to Stop a Detractor from Churning?
• How to turn Detractors into Promoters? 
• What About Detractors That Give No Feedback?
• Can You “Save” Every Single Detractor?
• The Bottom Line

Detractors are kind of a “taboo” topic in the business world – nobody really likes talking or thinking about upset customers.

But those customers are actually vital for business development and this quote should sum up just how important they really are:

“The brand is no longer what we tell the customer it is – it is what the customers tell each other it is.”- Scott Cook

True, most unhappy customers decide to never use the service they didn’t like, or even worse, share their disappointment with their friends.

That shows why you can’t ignore Detractors but there’s more. Even though negative feedback might seem like a terrible thing, customers that express their dissatisfaction are creating an opportunity for you to improve their experience.

But how do you actually do that?

Well, if you want to truly understand Detractors and learn how to appease them, check out this article.

Key Takeaways

• Use NPS and CSAT surveys to spot Detractors early and engage them before they churn silently.
• Address issues with speed and empathy to turn negative experiences into positive outcomes.
• Focus on resolving high-priority Detractor concerns first to prevent further damage to your brand.
• Implement changes based on Detractor feedback and show them that their input leads to real improvements.

What Is a Detractor?

Generally speaking, you define Detractors as someone who is unhappy with your brand, product or service; someone who finds fault with everything you say or do.

In other words – a critic.

In business, this term is used when referring to a customer segment in the Net Promoter Score® framework. Detractors are the survey respondents who score you from 0 to 6 on the NPS® scale. They are unsatisfied customers who will recommend against your company.

But as a more standard Detractors definition, you can just think of them as dissatisfied customers.

How to Identify Detractors

There are several customer satisfaction metrics that you can use to identify your Detractors, the top two being – Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.

To understand the difference between these methodologies, consider the following analogy:

Let’s assume that your company is a bucket holding a “pool” of customers.

The water flowing from the above tap is the newly acquired customers, while the holes in the bucket are potential bottlenecks in customer experiences that push the water out.

The rate at which the water flows from the tap would be your company’s growth rate (G), while the total outflow of water through the holes would be your churn rate (C).

Ideally, you would want to reduce your churn rate and increase the growth rate, so that you could serve the maximum number of customers and build up revenue.

CSAT helps you assess the number of holes in your bucket and provides actionable insights for solving them. It’s measured by asking how customers would rate a recent business experience on a scale of 1 to 5 (there are also variations with a scale of 1-3 or 1-7).

Net Promoter Score, on the other hand, tracks the overall customer experience. It’s measured by asking the question:

“On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [company] to a friend or colleague?”

While CSAT measures customer satisfaction for every activity, NPS data helps you assess the potential growth rate of your company and provides open-ended actionable feedback to bring down the churn.

To explain it with the pool analogy, CSAT aims to just fill up the holes (C), but they don’t give you solid insights into the projected growth trajectory (G).

NPS can be used to discover leaks that you didn’t even know existed. It’s focused on the overall customer experience instead of a specific interaction.

It also offers much wider coverage. While CSAT surveys mostly reach active users (who are already engaged with your product), NPS surveys can be sent to users who are about to churn or newly acquired customers (who have not yet used the service).

For any conventional business, CSAT acts as a lagging indicator of short-term customer happiness (satisfactory transactional experiences), while NPS acts as the leading indicator of long-term customer happiness (great product experiences).

Since you are at a higher risk of losing non-engaged and dissatisfied customers than active users, NPS proves to be a much better metric for identifying core issues and reaching customers before they switch to a competitor.

That, however, does not mean that CSAT surveys are inferior to NPS.

Often, feedback captured from CSAT surveys can be instrumental in root cause analysis and improving customer experiences. These surveys can be used in conjunction with NPS surveys to narrow down short-term problems, weigh their importance, and take corrective action.

How Detractors Can Ruin Your Business?

It can be easy to ignore Detractors if they’re not a very large percentage of your whole customer base. You can make money off of your loyal clients, right?

Not exactly. If you actually do that, you leave your business open to serious risks since Detractors can damage it.

Here’s how:

Detractors Bring Your Sales & Profits Down

It’s not hard to see how – upset customers simply won’t have a reason to keep doing business with you. In fact, according to data, poor service costs businesses an average of $41 billion each year – and that’s only in the US!

Let’s take a closer look at the facts.

To start with, it’s well known that around 41% of consumers will spend less money on a service if they have a bad experience with it. A recent CX trends report also states that 50% of customers will switch to a different brand after just one bad experience, while a second experience of this kind will rocket your numbers to 80%.

What’s more, 51% of B2B customers will avoid your brand if they have a poor customer service experience for up to two years. 

Your business will also lose money because you’ll need to find new customers to take the place of the Detractors you lost. Acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining existing ones – five times more, to be precise.

On top of the money wasted on ads and lead generation, you’ll lose valuable time and manpower which could be redirected to the benefit of your existing customers.

Too many unhappy customers also makes it hard to justify premium prices. When your brand is linked to negative experiences, you might be forced into price wars or discounting, which cuts into profits and damages your brand’s reputation.

Moreover, research showcases that the success rate of selling to a new customer is only between 5% to 20%. Compare that to the rate for existing customers which is between 60% – 70%.

Oh, and get this – only one in 26 unhappy customers is going to complain. The other 25 will simply churn. So, you might not even realize how much money you lose until it’s too late.

Detractors Harm Your Brand’s Image

In times when negative word of mouth can have damaging effects on your business, ignoring such customers would be a big mistake. Thanks to the power of social media, people can now easily gather and share information on their experience with your brand.

And social media is exactly where a large number of customers go to complain when they have a poor experience with a brand.

What’s more, 70% of consumers specifically call out brands on social media to make other people aware of potential issues.

Safe to say, that’s not going to do your brand’s image any favors. Potential leads will be scared off when they associate your company’s name and imagery with those social media posts and angry reviews from unhappy customers.

Also, consider this – a dissatisfied customer will tell anywhere from 9 to 15 people about heir bad experiences with your brand. Even worse – approximately 13% of them go the extra mile and notify 20 people about this.

Lastly, in very extreme scenarios, customers might be so upset to go as far as informing the media about their experience. Granted, only 5% do that for now, but it’s not exactly a risk you can afford to ignore.

It’s the kind of thing big companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast ignored for years, that place them at the bottom of the customer satisfaction benchmarks.

Detractors Help Your Competition

“Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will.”

That quote from Lauren Freedman (President of the e-tailing group, a popular Ecommerce consultancy) pretty much sums it all up.

Quick – what’s the first thing a Detractor is going to do once they abandon your brand?

Find an alternative to your service, of course. And that’s where your competitors come into play – just waiting to snatch up your customers.

That’s no speculation – 8 in 10 customers say they have no problem switching to a competitor if they receive poor customer service.

And pretty much anything can trigger that.

In fact, 74% of consumers consider switching to a competitor if the checkout process is difficult, while 50% of them will gladly do it if you don’t anticipate their needs. Also, if your customers feel like they are underappreciated, nearly 40% of them will switch companies.

So, the more Detractors you have and the more you ignore them, the easier you make it for your competitors to take the lead on the market.

Detractors Can Drain Employee Motivation

Detractors don’t just affect your business – it can really take a toll on your employees too. According to a Fontana study, one-third of employees who regularly handle difficult customers report a significant increase in work-related stress.

This isn’t just an occasional bad day – it can be a key factor leading to burnout. In fact, according to a survey by Jeff Toister, author of “The Service Culture Handbook”, 59% of customer service representatives are at risk of burnout, with 28% facing severe burnout.

But the issue runs even deeper. Among those at severe risk of burnout, 52% said their company is not customer-focused. This disconnect between company values and day-to-day experiences only adds to the strain, leaving employees feeling unsupported and undervalued.

Employees who feel constantly stressed and unappreciated are much more likely to consider leaving. Plus, the time your team spends putting out fires with Detractors often means they’re pulled away from more rewarding and creative tasks. This can leave them feeling stuck, further draining their motivation.

As this cycle of demotivation continues, it can start to affect the whole team. When individual performance dips, team morale can crumble, making it harder to maintain a positive and productive workplace environment.

How Much Time Do You Have to Stop a Detractor from Churning?

The answer to this question depends on a number of factors, from your responsiveness to your ability to connect with customers, solve their issues and improve their experience.

There’s no “industry standard” time that you can use to work out how long you have until a Detractor leaves. Most Detractors, however, fit into one of the below categories:

• They’ve already decided to cancel and want you to know why;
• They are frustrated and actively researching and considering alternatives, but haven’t decided to cancel yet;
• Certain aspects of your product or a single interaction have disappointed them, but they still think your product or service has potential and want to help you improve it;
• They use your product out of necessity and aren’t actively considering switching to an alternative, but want to voice their complaints and criticism.

Although not all Detractors fit into these categories, you can use them to segment many of your customers based on their feedback. Most of the time, customers in the first category — Detractors that have already decided to cancel — will leave the soonest.

Retaining these customers can be a serious challenge — one that simply can not be taken up by most brands. Once a customer has made up their mind to cancel, they’re already out the door.

Detractors that fit into the other three categories, however, usually won’t rush to cancel.

How to turn Detractors into Promoters? 

Retaining a customer who’s already next to the door is a real challenge. We’ll outline several actionable strategies we tested out and found to work very well:

1. Encourage Feedback & Make It Simple to Get in Touch

The truth is that you have fewer fully satisfied customers than you might think. If you don’t hear a complaint, it doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. And if you don’t see it, there’s little you can do to prevent any future occurrences. 

Many customers who feel ignored simply stop doing business with you or switch to your competitor without even giving you the opportunity to improve.

Bearing this in mind, you should make it simpler for the customer to get in touch with you. If they run into another barrier of not being able to voice their complaint, that will only anger them more. 

Don’t let customer surveys be the only way they can reach you. Be available to provide customer support on the channel they prefer using. Be it your website, mobile app, or social media – they should be able to provide feedback without having to complete numerous forms.

Also, don’t wait until customers come to you. Be proactive in reaching out to them and asking for feedback. They will give you the opportunity to fix small problems on the initial stage before they escalate into bigger issues.

Just make sure you give off the feeling that you want their feedback and need their suggestions. Customers are setting time aside from their busy days to give valuable feedback. So, if you make them feel like you’re just collecting data for the show, they will not be willing to collaborate.

Around 73% of buyers say that valuing their time is one of the best ways a company can offer them great service. And we already discussed how upset customers will quickly switch to a competitor if they feel like you don’t appreciate them enough.

So we’re not just speculating.

In addition, put your contact information prominently across your website or email. People want to know that they can reach you.

Oh, and train your employees to be amiable even if the feedback is negative, or the customer is very angry. If they talk back or try to shift the blame on the client, it will only escalate the hostilities, making things worse.

What they actually need to do in such a situation is to listen, ask questions, apologize, and be polite. Detractors might actually calm down when they see that your reps are emphatic and taking their frustrations and pain points seriously.

2. Provide Swift Responses

If a Detractor is in a “pulling my hair” state, responding as soon as possible should become your first priority. One unsolved issue in due time can escalate to several brand-damaging comments since 40% of business buyers get frustrated the most because of slow response times.  

Replying to a customer in less than an hour rather than 48 hours can make a huge difference – it proves that you are genuinely concerned about their satisfaction and that your business puts client interests first. Also, a timely response can significantly minimize the chances of possible damage to your reputation. 

After all, when it comes to customer service, 90% of consumers want an “immediate” response. And 60% rate “immediate” as ten minutes or less!

Sure, that mostly sounds like B2C buyers, but get this – 80% of B2B customers also expect responses in real-time. In fact, 67% of them actually want a response via email within one hour, while 15% of them expect to get an immediate answer.

Automation can improve your efficiency by allowing you to make the most of your time. While some companies might be hesitant to use automation due to its impersonal nature, when properly implemented, automated responses can be a great way of interacting with customers.

But don’t get carried away by that. You can’t just automate replies – you also need to personalize them.  If the already upset Detractors see a generic reply, there’s a good chance they’ll simply ignore it, assuming you didn’t even bother listening to their problems.

Plus, personalization is more important than ever nowadays. Luckily, today’s automation tools can personalize your responses in many ways that will help you take care of far more customers than you possibly could if you were using the old-fashioned, manual approach.

Let’s say you want to send a personalized email to those Detractors who haven’t specified why they gave you a low score. 

What you can do is set up a rule that will trigger an email reply to those contacts who gave you a rating of zero to six points on the NPS scale. Personalize your email by including their name, acknowledgment of their feelings, a question to find out what went wrong and a sweet thank you for closure.

3. Listen and Show Empathy

About 79% of consumers want human-driven service nowadays. They just don’t like the idea of dealing with a chatbot or self-service options.

It’s not hard to see why. Customers often understand that you are following the script. And it might make them feel like “I’m just another problem on their list”. 

Try to make an emotional connection with your customers and give them a sense that you are in a conversation with them. Speak to them in a friendly and engaging tone. Appear eager to solve their concerns. The occasional emoticon might actually mellow down even the most frustrated customers. Typically, customers prefer a casual tone, and reps acting like a human – not a machine.

When customers reach out to you, they want to be heard and to feel like you are on their side. Apologizing and relating with simple phrases like “I’d be upset too if that happened to me,” can do the trick. Overall, the tonality should express that they as a customer matter to you and that you both are facing this challenge together.

Listening is another crucial element of showing that you care. You should get a sense of how your customers feel by paying attention to the tone of voice and punctuation – are they stressed, angry or frustrated? Knowing this information can help you choose the right approach.

Here’s a quote that best illustrates why actively engaging with upset customers is an asset:

“When customers share their story, they’re not just sharing pain points. They’re actually teaching you how to make your product, service, and business better.”

4. Don’t Overpromise and Underdeliver

Sometimes, it can take time to implement the suggestions or feedback received from your customers, so it is important to inform them that their feedback is being considered and used to improve. 

And if you can’t fix the issue, make sure to explain why. Be honest with them. Honest business practices motivate customers. That means employees will work harder and consumers will buy more of your product.

Never make promises you can’t respect. It’s better to come clean and admit what limitations you’re dealing with than to overpromise and underdeliver. If you do that, you’ll lose their trust for good – not to mention it’ll make your brand look bad.

And whatever you do, don’t tell Detractors there’s nothing you can do to help them. Instead, focus on what you can do for them – even if that means issuing a refund. Always make sure that the interaction you have with your customers will leave behind a good memory.

5. Set Up a Prioritization System

This is one of the most efficient ways to optimize your support team’s workflow. Asking for and collecting feedback is a good start, but if your support reps get flooded with tickets, and don’t know which ones to handle first, you’ll just end up losing the Detractors for good.

You could use a FIFO system (First In First Out), which pretty much means your support teams help customers in the order they sent the inquiries in.

However, that can be an issue when dealing with Detractors. After all, should your support team handle a lead’s question about your product just because they sent in the ticket first, or should they focus on a Detractor who is having trouble with the product instead?

So what approach works better then?

It’s best to use customer support software that allows you to use automation to directly assign priority levels to customer tickets based on their severity (which you do by creating rules). Also, one should look into applying the escalation rules, that will redirect it to other staff in the operational hierarchy.

6. Close the Feedback Loop

Responding to Detractors fast, doing that in a calm and polite manner, acknowledging their frustrations, and properly prioritizing issues is very important.

But that alone won’t be enough to fully turn Detractors into Promoters.

To do that, you also need to provide a solution – basically, act on the received feedback. Start by sharing it across departments and discussing recurring problems with stakeholders.

And don’t be afraid to collaborate with Detractors throughout the whole process if they’re willing – they can provide valuable insights, and you show them how much you value their opinions.

Once you have a clear idea of which issues should be handled first, share the key takeaways with your team.

Finally, you also have to follow up with Detractors to let them know what actions were taken following their feedback, and what the results were. That’s the only way you will manage to close the customer feedback loop, which is essential to offering a better customer experience.

7. Learn From Your Mistakes

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. If all you want is for your NPS score to be high – you are wrong. The Net Promoter System is not about who gets the higher score. It’s about addressing the issues reported by customers, closing the loop and building trust.

Treat each piece of feedback as a chance to become better, create a better experience for your customers, and distinguish yourself from the competition.

A customer who had an unpleasant experience but was overjoyed by the way you handled their complaint is more likely to become a passionate advocate for your brand than someone who is indifferent.

By truly listening to your Detractors, you can turn unfavorable feedback into an opportunity to drive growth for your business.

8. Make Them Feel Special

When dealing with a Detractor, the first thing you need to do is come up with a solution. Every piece of feedback is unique, so your solution should be unique as well. 

You can show your customers that you are truly sorry by giving them a discount, free shipping, or even offering your product free of charge.

But this step is tricky – solving the problem might not be enough for some Detractors. In those cases, you need to go out of your way to make them feel important and respected.

Do something they will remember. You can surprise them by sending a personal “apology” note, a gift card, or even something related to their interest. That increases the likelihood of them sharing the positive experience with others.

Having someone from the management reach out to this person will make them feel good too. As a customer, they will feel that their concern is a top priority.

Most successful companies know that great customer service is the key to winning the customer back. And this goes beyond the “great” to which most companies aspire. 

For example, Zappos once sent flowers to a woman whose feet were damaged by medical treatments. Amazon is known for refunding small balances of 16 cents to customers when the price of an item they’ve previously ordered went down.

Customer service at this level isn’t cheap. But it’s very effective. It increases customer satisfaction and the likelihood that they will tell others about your product/service, leading to positive word-of-mouth.

You don’t have to do it for every Detractor. Start with just a few customers and then make a decision based on their reactions.

9. Tap into Customer Data and Targeted Outreach

If you want to turn Detractors into your biggest fans, start by mapping your customer journey and collecting data at key touchpoints. Think of it as creating a roadmap with every step a customer takes with your brand – from the first impression to the final interaction. This way you can identify exactly where things might have gone wrong – like a frustrating checkout process or a confusing onboarding experience.

Use sentiment analysis to dive deeper into how your customers feel about these interactions. By analyzing conversations and survey data while monitoring social media and reviews, you can uncover the emotions behind their feedback, whether they’re slightly annoyed or seriously considering switching to a competitor.

With these insights in hand, the next step is to personalize your response. Instead of sending a generic apology, craft a response that shows you’ve truly listened. If a customer is frustrated with slow delivery, offer expedited shipping on their next order. If someone feels ignored during a support call, reach out with a personalized message that addresses their exact concern and perhaps includes a special discount as a gesture of goodwill.

By combining these insights you can transform negative experiences into positive connections. In fact, a Salesforce research shows that 73% of customers now expect better personalization as technology advances. This proactive approach helps rebuild trust and loyalty, turning Detractors into enthusiastic supporters of your brand.

10. Use A/B Testing to Refine Recovery Tactics

A/B testing is your go-to tool for fine-tuning how you handle customer recovery. Want to know if a heartfelt apology works better than a tempting discount? Test it out! By trying different approaches – like tweaking the tone of your emails, changing the timing of your follow-up or adjusting the offers you make – you can uncover what truly resonates with your Detractors.

Some customers might respond better to a quick, straightforward apology, while others might be swayed by a little extra incentive to stay loyal. A/B testing takes the guesswork out of the process, providing real data on what actually works to win back customers. This way, every move you make is backed by hard evidence.

Over time, this iterative process sharpens your approach, helping you turn more Detractors into loyal customers. And the beauty of A/B testing? You can apply it across all aspects of your recovery strategy – whether you’re experimenting with different communication channels, like email vs. SMS, or testing the effectiveness of personalized offers.

By continuously optimizing based on what works best, you’re not just resolving issues – you’re creating positive experiences that turn Detractors into dedicated advocates of your brand.

What About Detractors That Give No Feedback?

Here’s a common scenario: a Detractor gives a low score in a Net Promoter Score survey. They don’t leave any text feedback, and they don’t respond when you reach out to ask what’s bothering them.

For a retention-focused business, this type of customer feedback should raise a red flag. You know they’re unhappy, and you know they’re likely to cancel in the future, but you don’t know the cause of their frustration or what you can do to make things right.

Instead of contacting the customer again to ask what’s bothering them, use the data you already have to learn the root cause of the customer’s frustration yourself.

Dig into the customer’s engagement and behavior metrics to find out what’s causing their low score:

• Did they abandon your product at a certain point in the setup or configuration process?
• Did they run into a confusing section of your app?
• Did they start using your software, only to abandon it at a bottleneck?
• Did they stop using your software after they discovered a feature they needed was only available in a paid (or more expensive) version?

It takes surprisingly little time to discover the root cause of most customers’ frustrations. In doing so, you completely change the dynamic of your follow-up emails, increasing the chance of a good response in the process.

The “What’s wrong?” follow-up, which usually goes ignored, becomes “We know what’s wrong, and here’s how we’re going to make it right.”

Like most aspects of the customer success processes, offering a solution to unhappy or frustrated customers can be, to some extent, systematized. Over time, you’ll notice common situations that affect a large percentage of your customers, all with their own solutions:

• Confusion over how to use your software, which can be solved with a personal “how-to” walkthrough session over hangouts, live chat or email.
• Frustration or concerns about pricing, which can be solved by reaching out with a special discount or offer.
• Worries that your software isn’t exactly what they’re looking for, which are often solved in a short hangout or phone call.

Once you identify the most common frustrations and concerns, and create unique, systematized solutions for each one, assisting an unhappy customer turns from a daunting task into a rewarding opportunity.

The next time you receive a low score from a Detractor, don’t go in aiming to learn what’s wrong and ask how you can help.

Instead, dig into your data to discover what’s affecting the customer and contact them with a solution. Instead of leaving the loop open, you’ll close the feedback loop and learn more about how you can further improve your product.

Can You “Save” Every Single Detractor?

Well, no – it’s not realistic to think you can turn every single Detractor into a Promoter. But you can retain them as customers or leave them with a positive impression of your business at the very least.

Still, sometimes, you will need to make a judgment call – is the Detractor in question worth “saving” at all?

Some customers are just not compatible with your business model. 

It can be hard to accept that, but you have to understand – in those situations, it’s not really your fault, and there’s not much you can do about it.

Maybe the customer is just plain rude, and verbally abuses your staff with every chance they get. Or maybe they have unrealistic demands from you – like expecting you to offer 24/7 phone support when you just run a small business.

And maybe their complaints and demands are theirs alone, and other customers don’t complain about them at all.

In that case, it just wouldn’t make sense to implement the feedback from a difficult client. If you were to do that, it might actually upset all your loyal customers.

Now, something like this shouldn’t happen often at all and would be just a worst-case scenario.

But if you do end up dealing with a very difficult customer, it might be worth thinking about whether or not all the time, money, and effort you will waste on them will actually be worth it.

Also, try to be courteous when terminating the relationship with the customer. Don’t be rude about it – just politely let them know you feel like this isn’t working out for them, issue a refund, and recommend some alternatives to your service.

Yes, we know that recommending a competitor feels very counterintuitive. But it’s not something that will work against you. The Detractor will likely stop doing business with you anyway since you probably can’t meet their unreasonable demands. Plus, we’re talking about a customer you wouldn’t mind losing.

Also, if you do that, the Detractor can’t complain that you didn’t at least bother offering them a solution for their issue – the issue you can’t help with.

And recommending services similar to your own might actually leave a better impression on the problematic customer. They might expect you to act rude or unprofessional, so it might catch them off guard. In fact, they might not even leave a bad review.

The Bottom Line

By acting quickly and providing a solution, you can win back almost any Detractor and improve your retention rate – all while reducing lost revenue and avoiding the high churn that can affect a large number of SaaS and other subscription-based businesses.

Even if you don’t win back every Detractor, acting quickly and showing that you care can help you avoid the other negative effects of unhappy customers, such as bad product reviews and negative public feedback on message board posts and blog comments.

Ready to improve your customer retention? Try Retently with a free 7-day trial and start turning feedback into growth opportunities.

The post The Complete Guide to Detractors – How to Turn Them into Promoters appeared first on Retently CX.